http://www.maniacsolutions.com/streamline-marketing-solutions-brisbane/
Getting the most from your investment in servers
Typical of any business in a booming environment, to expand operations, hire more people, open new offices (perhaps even plants) in growth markets and diversifying the product portfolio to capture a wider segment of the market. In the process, IT infrastructure expands to meet the expansion. Everything looks rosy at the moment.
Then things turn for the worst. Competition is set day, nipping at their established markets. It is a price war breaks to eat at their margins. To offset declining profits, is performed throughout the organization to reduce costs by asking all departments to determine the contributions to the baseline.
The IT department has followed the business' expansion. You have built a strong 1000 server through the four major countries. All offices have e-mail servers and back-office servers administrative support, accounting and human resources. You also have a number of servers dedicated to sales and support. A bulk of his servants, and where most demand is coming from, is with the product development teams located in four major cities around the world. Each time a new application is approved for introduction in commercial transactions, the new servers are sent to various offices charged with the new application. A thorough assessment of asset usage showed that most servers are underutilized. The aggregate computing power is impressive, but so is the cost of maintaining these servers, operating systems and host applications.
Change in business climate forces them to streamline all aspects of the operation. Has asked all directors of business unit cut corners when it made sense. He asked the CIO to do the same with the IT department. With server utilization by 30 percent and growing server sprawl to 30 percent per year, the potential savings to be achieved through consolidation of servers onto fewer servers more powerful (those with high retirement maintenance cost and book value close to zero). Furthermore, by using virtualization technology, you can create virtual servers that can perform the same function unless the original server hardware, maintenance and support costs associated with a physical device.
The CIO believes that will reduce the inventory of hardware of assets by at least 30 percent. In addition, the reduction in physical hardware infrastructure mean less equipment to keep physically freeing up valuable IT expertise to focus on application development and fewer requests for overtime during scheduled maintenance periods. Furthermore, the development new applications can be scheduled more quickly than practically no waiting time for new hardware to be ordered, delivered and installed.
Mike Clayville, vice president and general manager of VMware Asia Pacific Operations notes that "virtualization has come of age in Asia and the Pacific. Currently, companies can extract cost savings across their entire desktop infrastructure, application servers. Server virtualization is a good first step towards full virtualization infrastructure. Companies immediate experience significant savings from server virtualization using less hardware, while reaping higher performance and utilization rates can go as high as 80% in some cases, along with ease of management and improved flexibility. More companies Asians have begun the process of implementing a robust virtual infrastructure to reduce IT costs through efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness. There is no better time to implement virtualization technologies as they are now mature, proven, stable, easy to use and relatively cost effective. "
Brisbane is the center of fastest growing region of Australia. Taking the lead in growth of the city is the Brisbane City Council. To comply with the advice of "Life in Brisbane 2010 vision, iDivision, the advice of his group, has rapidly developed new applications that improve the quality of life in the city. Initially, the technical and performance requirements forced the policy of "one server per application." However, in late 2002, the servers had iDivision 85-small and medium enterprises support for various control applications work and time management for large applications, such as procurement.
Increased demand and growth of small applications led to a proliferation of servers. This resulted in increased maintenance costs and management. Scalability often servers are required to be moved and replaced – both disruptive and costly. With an average CPU utilization of up to 8 percent, capital costs were high compared to the value provided.
Anticipating further growth, the iDivision studied the options and recommended a consolidation project servers to stem rising costs and underutilization of assets. A team of server consolidation of Intel Solution Services (ISS) conducted a technical evaluation and financial analysis of the data center iDivision. The Microsoft and HP consultants provided technical support.
ISS recommends consolidation Web, database and Citrix servers using VMware ESX Server software. The proof of concept and pilot study involved 22 physical servers consolidated into two two Citrix ESX SQL servers and 13 physical servers into two servers running Windows Server 2003 (the second server was used as a backup). The deployment of VMware ESX Server through the entire data center success tests soon followed.
Figures 1 and 2 show the projected savings to be achieved by strengthening both the servers Microsoft SQL Server and Citrix servers, respectively. One reason for the consolidation 13:02 for Microsoft SQL Servers would AU $ 761,000 in four years. Consolidation 22:02 Citrix server would save AU $ 850,000 over four years.
Earlier, a proposal to build a site iDivision disaster recovery was rejected by the council, and involved more than 90 servers replication. The consolidation project to reduce the cost of a secondary site in the middle of making it more affordable.
After successfully executing a 32-partition ESX Server for the development of six months, undertook iDivision migration of all production servers in the consolidated server environment. Ultimately, the VMware ESX Server 20 is responsible for all data center load work, including testing.
Thinking about consolidating your server environment? Check out a new addition to this function.
About the Author
Jose Allan Tan is a technologist-market observer based in Asia. A former marketing director for a storage vendor, he is today director of web strategy and content director for Questex Asia Ltd. He also served as senior industry analyst for Dataquest/Gartner and was at one time an account director for a regional PR agency.
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