Delivering the virtual world
THE NATURE OF HOW companies manage their IT infrastructure is changing, although not as fast as some technology vendors would have us believe. In the bowels of every modern business lies the data centre – a room full of neat rows of servers humming busily away in their clean, air-conditioned rooms helping your mail to be delivered and your orders processed.
Previously when companies bought mainframe computers from the likes of IBM, it was much simpler to manage that entire infrastructure.
But then again, in those days there was a limited amount of systems that a company would run and often all of those would be bought from a single vendor or developed internally to suit the company’s specific needs.
“What changed was the rise of Windows and Intel as a joint force in the data centre,” says Bernard Donnelly, services and technology head at Unisys. “In order to cater for all the new services that companies wanted to deploy, the number of Windows on Intel (Wintel) servers in data centres grew at an astronomical pace.”
The problem is that unlike Windows-based computers on the desktop, the server versions of Windows don’t multitask very well. In a production environment, the standard procedure is that each application will go on to its own server.
Donnelly says that’s led to a situation where the average server in a company is only running at between 10% and 15% of its capacity.
To solve that problem companies have resorted to a technology called virtualisation. That creates a way of loading multiple operating systems on to a single machine, fooling the application that it’s running on its own hardware, while it’s actually sharing it with other applications.
Lewis Gee, vice-president of VMWare’s EMEA region, says that not only allows companies to obtain better use from their existing infrastructure but also to take a number of machines running at well below capa-city and consolidate them on to a single machine. That has real benefits in terms of cutting power usage and allowing companies to roll out new services faster than ever possible before.
However, Donnelly cautions that this newfound speed has brought with it the risk that management of all such virtual machines may be more complex than protagonists of the technology often let on. He also warns that because some software makers haven’t contemplated the exact implications of virtualisation, it’s possible that going that route could cost the company more money in software licensing fees.
However, in most cases the savings made by using less power and buying fewer servers make up for that. With server sales continuing to grow and companies looking for increased horsepower, the trend looks set to continue.
Finweek
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