Welcome to the fourth installment of the ITO series on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux blog. I started the IT Optimization saga with the basics- what does it mean to optimize IT? Then, I illustrated how having the right platform can help modernize your IT infrastructure by not only maintaining stability but also poised towards innovation. Last week, I talked about another key component of every IT infrastructure- Storage and how Red Hat Storage solutions can help your organization modernize storage and reduce cost. This week, let me walk you through a Red Hat offering that can dramatically decrease your IT spending- Virtualization.

Virtualization is a piece of technology that has been around for a long time now. It is the cornerstone of Data Centers, and with close to 80% workloads virtualized today, it is still at the heart of IT infrastructure. With the advent of containers, the virtualization footprint of organizations only continues to grow as IT leaders take advantage of infrastructure refresh opportunities to evaluate new approaches to complete virtualization! Virtualization could be termed the middle generation of the IT infrastructure- it is sandwiched between the older generation- which is the traditional bare metal workloads and the cool new generation, namely- public/private clouds and new compute models such as containers.

Red Hat Virtualization(RHV) is the most perfect specimen of the middle generation. It is a easy to use software-defined platform built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kernel based Virtual Machine (KVM) based technologies.It supports traditional workloads that once ran on bare metal and also extremely well suited to run workloads in the  cloud and as far as containers go- “Containers are Linux” has always been Red Hat’s drum beat! Now, you may be thinking that there are several virtualization solutions in the market. But, let us explore what the Red Hat Advantage is! First off, RHV offers you the trademark benefits of server consolidation, power savings and space savings. The real differentiator, that makes RHV so unique, is the no CapEx model- you heard it right, this means zero license cost.  This can save your organization millions, which you can use to consolidate and standardize your infrastructure instead of spending it on costly licenses! The only expenses that RHV incurs is the operational expenses! If the Virtualization market held the Tony’s, RHV would be the Hamilton! Don’t believe me, click here to view what one of our customers, Intermountain Healthcare had to say about RHV!

With RHV you can buy what you need, when you need it! You are firmly in the driver’s seat of your IT infrastructure truck and can renew or expand as the need arises. The best part is you are not locked in with any vendor and have complete control over your IT spending. The icing on the cake is that RHV, is one of the industry’s leading hypervisors when it comes to performance! So the advantage is not just cost, but also speed- Applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with RHV tend to run at record setting speeds!

RHV is open and interoperable with other solutions in the Red Hat portfolio fostering seamless integration that drastically improve operational efficiency. Like all other Red Hat products, it is designed the open source way- Red Hat engineers contribute to the open source communities and we at Red Hat distill maximum value out of, certify and harden it to make innovative enterprise-ready software that integrates with Windows workloads as well.

In summary, RHV allows customers to easily easily virtualize applications and build a high-performance virtualization foundation for cloud-native workloads, reducing IT expenses while improving workload scalability and security. To learn more about how Red Hat Virtualization and how it can help you modernize your infrastructure, visit the Red Hat Booth at Summit where you can try the latest version of RHV hands on!  If you can’t make it there in person, you can attend “virtually” here - where we bring you optimization related posts, technical deep-dives, and demos than can help you transform your IT infrastructure!