Re: [SAGE] Build versus Buy IT

[Scott Burch <scott.burch@camberwind.com>]

John Arrasjid wrote:

>Have you considered virtualizing your servers to cut costs in the following
>areas?
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>

This is certainly being considered on the Intel side. The use of blade 
servers could substantially reduce power consumption, and obviously 
VMware could be used to consolidate many idle application servers. On 
the UNIX side we have done as much as we currently can in terms of 
consolidation/virtualization with our exisiting infrastructure. We 
consolidate many JAVA based enterprise applications on Web Logic 
clusters. We have heavily consolidated Oracle instances on several large 
clustered servers (this can be good and bad). There is great opportunity 
to consolidate many other smaller applications into virtualized 
environments. From recent NDA discussions with IBM they will allow the 
greatest flexibility for virtualization with AIX 5.3 and the Power 5 
architecture. We are primarily Solaris, so we will have to closely 
examine how Solaris Containers compares with the upcoming expanded 
features of 5.3 and Power 5 (Unfortuantely I'm not at liberty to discuss 
those changes here).

To do what we need on the UNIX side we need the newer software 
virtualization features that are not fully available currently. Of 
course we have many hardware partitioned Solaris boxes, but these are 
not really cost effective. The multi-cpu board type Solaris boxes are 
really supposed to be used to run large applications/data-sets. To buy a 
15K, etc. and carve up into little machines is not very cost effective. 
The features of AIX that allow for multiple OS instances and dynamic 
resource sharing amongst those images is something that we could really 
use...and around June of this year there will be much more granularity 
in terms of how you can carve up the resources.

-Scott

>1) Total number of servers.
>2) Reduced maintenance costs due to reduced servers.
>3) Reduced power and AC consumption.
>4) Reduced rack space and server room space.
>5) Reduced rollout costs.
>
>FYI: I have been using VMware products now since about 1999 and am currently
>working for VMware. I have seen many IT groups reduce their operating costs,
>reduce the time and cost of new server rollouts, and help minimize the
>impact to the IT staff.
>
>FYI-2: You still need to pay for licensing if you are using licensed OS's.
>You also still need to maintain the number of OS's rolled out.
>Virtualization puts the IT group in a more proactive, reduced cost
>environment.
>
>john
>
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