Issue link: http://hub-fr.insight.com/i/532074
9 ✓ Faster provisioning: Provisioning resources for a traditional data center can take some time and it's often a one-way street. Once resources are provisioned, it can be difficult to reprovision them. Often it's easier to just buy new servers, storage or other network assets. By comparison, virtualized environments can be reprovisioned with a few clicks. Does a workgroup need more storage? Does the lab need extra computing power for a few weeks? Fire up your virtualization dashboard and it's done. ✓ Fewer business disruptions: When a physical server fails, it can take days or weeks to replace it. Someone on the IT team needs to buy and reinstall new hardware. And if you don't have a current full- image backup of the server, you'll also need to reinstall the operating systems and applications, configure directories, restore settings, reconfigure databases, and restore as much of the data as you can find. In a virtual environment, failed servers are bypassed and data keeps flowing. ✓ Easier backups: In a virtualized environment, it's easy to have full backups or snapshots of your virtual servers, virtual machines, databases, files and settings. Virtual environments can be backed up from the system level to the object level as often as you want, and it's all transparent. ✓ No vendor lock-in: Virtualized data centers have a level of abstraction between hardware and software. That means a virtual machine doesn't know or care what server hardware it runs on. You're not tied to one vendor for your hardware, operating system or cloud platform.