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Virtualisation of servers

By Probrand Ltd

Virtualisation

Virtualisation today means different things to different people, one thing in common, though, is that organisations are looking for virtualisation to reduce costs and simplify infrastructure.

Server Virtualisation

Virtualisation is the pooling and sharing of IT resources including servers, storage and networking. Through virtualisation, resources can be allocated dynamically across your organisation's applications and processes.

Analyst IDC has produced a forecast that the number of “virtualised system images” (or virtual machines) is expected to grow from 778,000 in 2004 to 5.1 million in 2009 (a compound annual growth rate of 45.7%).

The benefits of virtualisation generally, and server virtualisation specifically, are off the scale. We are talking about comfortably increasing server utilisation from less than 10% to 50% or more. Some customers have reduced their rack space down to 25% of the pre-virtualisation level, allowing them to save money and increase reliability.

The savings in manpower are significant, because fewer servers means fewer people are required for hands-on server administration. In the end, virtualisation comes down to that: the savings customers can make on the bottom line, and they can be very considerable indeed.

Storage Virtualisation

Information is critical to the success of all businesses and a consolidated storage/server infrastructure provides the storage foundation for a highly-flexible and responsive IT strategy.

Why invest in a Server and Storage Virtualisation Solution?

The primary reason for deploying storage systems is to simplify and optimise the current storage infrastructure.

Storage consolidation is the concept of centralising and sharing storage resources among multiple application servers.

Storage consolidation is generally achieved through one or more of four specific architectural methods:

  • Enterprise RAID storage consolidation
  • Storage Area Network (SAN) storage consolidation
  • Network-attached storage (NAS) storage consolidation
  • ISCSI Storage Systems

Storage system architectures are designed to solve the growing data demands of information rich business environments.

Virtualisation Benefits

Simplified Environment
The whole environment becomes easier to manage. Staff costs are reduced and fewer staff are required to manage fewer servers and larger amounts of storage.
Lower Annual Maintenance Costs
As the infrastructure is simplified, older servers can be phased out or moved to a lower level support contract.
High Availability
Reducing the numbers of servers and associated storage allows data to be simply replicated, in real-time, to a remote location ensuring immediate system availability in the event of a major failure disaster.
Simplified Storage Capacity Management
Focus on storage requirements instead of on size, type and characteristics of individual physical disk drives. Storage increased by simply adding virtual volumes.
Simplified Allocation of Storage
Storage carved out into virtual volumes that can be allocated to servers when necessary and then returned to the storage pool for reallocation.
Centralised Storage in a Heterogeneous Environment
Different servers with different operating systems can be attached to and share a massive, centralised storage pool.
Efficient Utilisation of Capacity
Schemes exist for distributing the data across any and all available storage resources allowing the system greater flexibility in how the storage is configured i.e. for redundancy or performance.
Disaster Recovery
As the data is now stored on an enterprise-class storage device, normally difficult to manage and expensive to purchase solutions such as snapshots of data become available. These can then be used to quickly and simply recover data.

Some Examples of Virtualisation:

  • Make significant savings on your energy consumption
  • Reduce the space required for servers and storage
  • Increase the available computer power
  • Produce measurably less CO2

City Council:

Reduced from 65 servers to 3 using virtualisation to serve 7,500 users.

The old server estate drew 82.03 amps generating 59,697 bytes per hour at an estimated annual cost of £16,037 for power and cooling costs alone without considering space or people costs.

New virtualised servers draw just 8.85 amps and generate a fraction of the heat of the original configuration. The annual projected cost saving is £14,260 per annum or £71,230 over 5 years in power and cooling alone.

NHS Hospital:

Compared power consumption from a traditional rack server, non virtualised environment to a virtualised environment:

Over a 5 year period, the power and air-conditioning costs for the current servers amounts to an approx value of £200,000.

With a virtualised environment of 15 virtualised servers, costs are £30,000. Over a 5 year period a cash saving in heat and power alone of some £170,000 or £34,000 per annum can be made.

Please email us at itfw@ogcbs.gsi.gov.uk if you have any feedback regarding this article.

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