Analysts: Virtualization to save businesses millions
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Butler Group report predicts savings from virtualization as it reduces energy consumption and operating costs.
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Read this white paper featuring VMware and LeftHand to learn about the true costs of storage and server sprawl, proven approaches to virtualization, and methods to maximize ROI using virtual machines on iSCSI SANs.
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The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.
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This paper introduces some techniques for making backups without needing to stop the business applications. It also describes ways to simplify and reduce the cost of system operations.
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Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced several moves it says will help its business customers take advantage of a technology called virtualization, and in the process help the software maker catch up with VMware Inc., the frontrunner in that area.
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The server virtualization trend continues, according to data center managers and analysts at this week's Infrastructure Management World. But  some users were skeptical about trying open source virtualization options.
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OS features virtualization technologies intended to help companies get more use from their hardware.
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(InfoWorld) - While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC's VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company's zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes. On the x86 server side, Nationwide reached 5,000 servers two years ago, running all sorts of departmental applications, notes Scott Miggo, vice president of technology solutions. "We were growing at a steady pace, so we wanted to control the server space and the costs for new development," he says. "A lot of our servers had only a 10 percent utilization rate," he notes, wasting much of the server capacity. Roughly half are production application servers and half are test-and-development servers. Today, there are 3,500 physical servers in operation but still 5,000 instances under management. The VMware servers typically host a dozen instances per physical server. "We assume every new server or application can be virtualized," Miggo says. He expects to have more than 1,000 virtual servers running on 89 physical servers by 2009. His team works to tweak I/O requirements or settings for virtual servers that may have trouble supporting I/O needs in their default state, and it works with vendors to support VMs where possible, before falling back to dedicated servers. Lotus Notes and database applications are examples of where the I/O requirements make virtualization not an option. Although it's easier to deploy servers in a virtual environment by using predefined images, "our staffing has stayed pretty much the same," Miggo says, because the same number of servers must still be monitored. The slight reduction in management overhead is offset by the need for VMware experts to manage the VMware environment, in addition to the server instances. And Nationwide learned the hard way that it needs to monitor both its virtual and physical servers, then correlate the two to identify potential trouble spots, Miggo says. Not doing so can make diagnosis hard, since a VM issue may be caused by a physical issue that a server monitor application running in only the VM won't detect. There's also more overhead needed for Miggo's shared-services group to coordinate all users (such as developers and application managers) of a physical server, as changes to the physical server could affect them all -- and because adjustments to one VM's application mix could affect I/O and other physical server performance characteristics. "We now have to coordinate with 12 users," Miggo says. "People were used to having their own boxes and doing their own thing. Now they're more tightly controlled, which they don't like. But they have to follow control processes like code management and release management since what they do could affect others," he notes. The use of EMC's VMotion software to load-balance and failover VMs across physical servers might reduce management, but the insurer is still exploring that technology. One barrier: Its requirement that all server instances run on physical servers with the same CPU family, requiring a consistent server pool to be in place. Nationwide runs its Web servers in a zLinux environment on IBM zSeries mainframes, supporting 650 guest operating systems (VMs) today, with space for another 650 before additional hardware frames would be needed. Often, using z/VM to support the virtualized Web servers requires a different strategy than using VMware to support virtualized Windows servers, Woeckener notes. For example, you might add memory, CPUs, or network cards to increase I/O on a VMware server. On a zSeries, the CPUs just handle executables, offloading physical I/O (such as network bandwidth and resource scheduling) to dedicated processors, so you don't need to worry about performance-sapping overhead incurred by server resource management. Another difference: Increasing heap size can improve performance in a Windows application but also degrade it in a zLinux application, Woeckener says. That's because Linux steals resources wherever it can find them, so any extra heap space is used by Linux for its own purposes, degrading application performance. When the heap size is reduced, Linux seeks resources elsewhere, giving the full heap to the application and improving performance. In both the VMware and z/VM environments, the ease of deploying new virtual servers has led Nationwide to align demand with real needs, as well as to encourage the use of VMs rather than physical servers. Virtual Windows servers cost a requestor $750 per month versus $2,000 per month for a physical server. And zLinux VMs add a per-MIP rate for weekday usage exceeding 15 MIPs. This overage charge steers batch processing to overnight and weekend periods, when overall demand is less, and forces developers of applications in use during the business day to optimize for performance, saving datacenter resources at the same time. Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
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It's real versatile, man Had you 'Rip van Winkled' your way through the first half of this decade, you could have fallen asleep thinking virtualisation was merely a means of slicing-up large servers. However you would have awoken to discover it is in fact one of the most versatile tools in IT.â¦
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InfoWorld - Server virtualization has, without doubt, taken the IT industry by storm. It provides a cost-effective way to dramatically reduce downtime, increase flexibility, and use hardware much more efficiently.
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Dell has announced the availability of virtualization services that aim to help enterprises draw up and implement their virtualization plans -- and it'll help you choose from its own hardware and software portfolio too of course.
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Many organizations allocate large resources to implement and deploy packaged ERP, CRM and SCM applications. Now these organizations need to move away from operational efficiency gains achieved and into leveraging their data for performance management and business intelligence.
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Server sprawl is virtually back Server virtualisation is taking companies back to the bad old days when they had no idea how many PCs and servers they had, because employees were buying them unchecked.â¦
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Backup volumes in many organizations have grown so large that they are causing business disruption by tying up systems, storage, and network capacity and hogging valuable IT resources, according to a recent survey commissioned by storage management software vendor BridgeHead Software.More than half (59 percent) of IT executives said that the volume of data they are forced to backup is disrupting business operations or will do so eventually, according to a survey of 472 IT executives in the U.K. and North America. And the problem is not going away, with 93 percent saying that their routine backup volumes are continuing to increase.The problem is consuming IT resources for long periods with 37 percent admitting that daily backups of primary data now take them more than nine hours, while 19 percent said it took them more than 12 hours.More than two-thirds (84 percent) of those polled felt they could benefit by reducing the volume of data they routinely back up. Among the chief advantages highlighted were:* Less IT time devoted to backup and other business continuity processes (69 percent) * A reduction in the impact of backup and replication on network utilization and capacity (60 percent) * A reduction in disk resources devoted to data snapshotting, replication, and mirroring (58 percent) * Reduced disruption to the live application environment (45 percent)One of the most effective ways of reducing the pressure on backups is to take information that is static or seldom accessed and archive it off primary storage systems according to BridgeHead Software CEO Tony Cotterill."Sixty-one percent of organizations in our survey admit that between 30 to 50 percent of data on their primary disk is unlikely to be accessed ever again, yet they are squandering time and resources on backing up and replicating this big chunk of static data. It's a very poor use of resources," said Cotterill.BridgeHead said its research reveals that many organizations are starting to use archiving for specific types of data, such as e-mails, motivated by compliance and disaster recovery. According to the company, a lot of archiving activity is currently championed by finance and other business departments outside of IT's control.But to have a major impact on backup volumes, BridgeHead reckoned that there needs to be an IT-driven move away from point solutions or isolated archive appliances towards taking an organization-wide approach to archiving, allowing IT to retrieve control by archiving all data types across the organization from a single point."If you can take an organization-wide approach to archiving, then the volume of data you're taking off the primary store will start to reach a critical mass that will help call a halt to increasing backup volumes," said Cotterill.The survey was part of BridgeHead Software's Annual Information Lifecycle Management Audit, conducted by eMedia on behalf of BridgeHead Software during August 2007. eMedia surveyed 324 senior level executives, IT managers, system and network administrators and engineers from North America and 148 from the U.K.Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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(Source: Lefthand Networks)  This white paper details the true cost of storage and server sprawl, proven approaches to virtualizing servers and storage, and how to maximize ROI using virtual machines on iSCSI SANs.
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(InfoWorld) - Managing transportation logistics is all about handling scale. As transportation management services firm Transplace added consumer goods companies such as Del Monte, Office Depot, Home Depot, Auto Zone, and DirecTV as customers, it needed to quickly bring server capacity online. Already planning a hardware refresh to support continued growth, CTO Vince Biddlecomb decided to bring in server virtualization at the same time so that he'd have a more scalable, flexible platform for that anticipated growth. Biddlecomb uses EMC VMware on his Sun servers mainly to support Oracle databases and J2EE applications on BEA's WebLogic Web server. He liked the fact that the technology was operating system- and hardware-agnostic, as his datacenter supports a range of technologies. And he found the virtualization approach to be less complex than, for example, running his Oracle databases on an IBM Power6-based System p 570 server, which he had considered initially. "We have all 12 instances sit on two logical partitions. We can configure the CPU and memory for each, and share when they are not busy," Biddlecomb says. But adopting virtualization required a deeper investment in datacenter hardware, Biddlecomb discovered, because virtualization changes the fundamental character of what is being supported. "You look at it as a pool of memory and CPUs. You just drop a couple VMs to increase capacity," he says. But treating servers as instances of capacity from a large pool of resources means that pool has to be kept available and running well. To do so, Biddlecomb discovered he needed to beef up the network I/O capabilities of the physical servers to avoid network traffic contention across the VMs sharing those ports. "We put more NICs in to them, since there is more network activity going on," he says. He also discovered he needed to beef up his SAN storage to support all the VMs that began to be created and to provide sufficient failover capacity in case of failure. "You can very quickly suck up 500GB or 1TB of storage for the VMs," Biddlecomb says. Although you no longer need storage in the servers themselves, you need more storage in the SAN, and that storage tends to be costlier. The more fine-grained your servers, the more storage you need, Biddlecomb notes. He likes to have more, smaller virtual servers so that each has a specific purpose that lets it be added or deleted easily without worrying about other applications that could be affected. But with 20GB of overhead for each virtual server, that approach can quickly eat up storage. Altogether, the use of virtualization roughly doubles the cost of a physical server, Biddlecomb says. He spends about $12,000 for a Dell server with extra NICs, plus $6,000 for VMware, and $5,000 for the associated enterprise storage. Because he had already planned to replace all his servers, there was no additional sticker shock from the fact that all physical servers needed CPUs from the same family, but most enterprises would require a complete server refresh. "You need to commit to building that infrastructure," he says. Biddlecomb also notes that the CPU-family restriction will limit how he can deploy virtualization in the future, and force him to forgo incremental technology improvements until the next server refresh. He's already been forced to do so: "We'll stick with our Intel servers even though the AMD [Barcelona-class Opteron] servers look to be better for memory management." One way he will work around that limitation in the future is to put physical servers into one of two clusters, one inside the DMZ and one outside. That way, he can stage his hardware refreshes by cluster, rather than do everything at once. Ultimately, Biddlecomb sees the use of virtualization as cost-neutral when it comes to the hardware side. "But you get a large savings in administration," he says. He has about 120 virtual servers spread out over 30 servers, administered by just two people. Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Nationwide Insurance Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank
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Virtualization company hopes to bring on its Apple Mac virtualization expertise software from the desktop to the server market. But do we need another hypervisor?