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By Barrie Parker, Chief Information Officer, Louisiana State fund.
The endless challenge for any organization (IT in particular) is to do more with less. We are all challenged daily to aggressively find opportunities and efficiencies wherever possible. While we have made significant strides in automating manual processes, moving into the e-commerce arena for our agency transactions, imaging our policy and claims files, etc., an area that has rarely been looked at for significant efficiencies before is the area of server consolidation.
Traditionally, when new applications came on-line, a new server was deployed. This led to the explosive growth of hardware to run these new applications, and as a natural consequence, translated into escalating IT maintenance costs. Often these new applications “did not play well” with other applications, had a different operating platform or needed a separate database, and therefore, needed their own server to run effectively. Also in the past, it was not feasible to continually load balance CPU needs so applications could share processing resources. These factors contributed to server proliferation, with most servers running at about 20% or less capacity. The end result was significantly higher IT operating costs, due to more hardware, more licensing and maintenance costs and higher energy consumption.
While virtualization is not a new concept (IBM mainframes had a primitive formof virtualization 20 years ago), it has not been available in the server environment until recently. Products such as VMware and MicroSoft Virtual Server now provide server virtualization, server clustering and system load balancing that can greatly bring down the cost of network operations. At LWCC, we have utilized the VMware product and have been able to consolidate 56 application servers into 4 ESX physical machines each housing about 14 virtual servers. The annual hardware costs have been reduced by about $200,000, and the licensing/ maintenance costs have been slashed by 75%.
An interesting side benefit to the server consolidation effort has been the shrinkage of the data center footprint. We have gained back about 50% of our rack space from the reduction in physical servers. In addition, power consumption is significantly less with fewer servers, even with the larger ESX machines, and can translate into much lower energy costs. We are seeing monthly utility savings in the order of around $3,000 as compared to energy costs before server consolidation.
The virtual copy (redundancy) component of virtualization enhances fail-over capabilities as part of business continuity execution. By creating virtual synchronized copies of critical applications and associated databases on clustered ESX machines, we can provide near-instantaneous recovery should a system fail. Also, we are able to perform application or database maintenance without bringing our core systems down. In the virtual world, you can move a copy of the application to another virtual server quickly and easily, then perform the necessary maintenance and move the copy back without impacting users or production.
In summary, if you want to lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of your network, look into server virtualization. While your savings may not be in the range of those seen at LWCC due to differing data center configurations, I think you will find some significant opportunities to do more with less.
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