KENSINGTON, Md. -
Data centers are getting cooler, and server racks are disappearing, as credit unions increasingly turn to virtual computing–but the latest wave in server and desktop technology is revealing itself as much more than a “green” initiative (see story, left).
The $260-million Signal Financial FCU here has found, whereas virtualization does enable it to consolidate its servers, thus saving energy and real estate, the technology also enhances disaster recovery (DR).
“Server virtualization will definitely improve the availability of your services,” said Steve Jones, CTO at Signal Financial.
One big win is that, because virtual machines are entirely software-based, IT doesn’t have to wrestle with the complicated hardware failures that are common to a disaster–or any minor mishap–in a conventional physical-server environment.
Instead, IT can switch over the virtual machine that was running on a failed server to a healthy server and have the applications up and running again in a matter of minutes–a key feature often known as “high-availability.”
“Virtual servers may suffer just a couple minutes of downtime as opposed to the hours it takes to rebuild or replace hardware in a physical server,” Jones said. Better yet, Signal Financial has now virtualized 85 % of its servers, both at headquarters and at is disaster recovery site, and has configured them for automatic high availability, which means they’ll instantly switch over, without human intervention.
“Sometimes when a regular physical server goes down, we have to do something manual to get back to normal operation levels, such as change the DNS to point to the backup server,” Jones said. “But our virtual provisioning can recognize when a physical server is down and automatically bring an application back up on a different virtual server host.”
But automatic high-availability doesn’t mean Jones is guaranteed a good night’s sleep. He’s alerted at the slightest blip, even if service is instantly reinstated.
“I get woken up in the middle of the night, often enough so that it’s obnoxious,” he said. “I want to know when something goes wrong.”
The “hardware-independent” essence of virtualization has made Signal Financial’s legacy systems more reliable as well, Jones said.
“You know how slow the software development process can be,” he explained. “That is the case in many industries, including ours. We’re full of mid-sized institutions where its necessary to outsource software solutions. You have an old system that’s held over from DOS back-in-the-day. You’ve somehow configured the legacy system to run on a Windows server, but if the server fails, you’re in trouble. You have to figure out how to configure that legacy piece to work on the Windows server once again, and in many cases it’s a mix of trial and error from experience and a little bit of luck.”
Hence, Jones has moved a number of legacy systems over to virtual servers. If a virtual server fails, the legacy system just bounces over to a functioning virtual server.
Signal Financial’s virtual servers are provided by Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware and reside on Storage Area Networks. VMware is one part of the credit union’s DR technology, which also includes transaction, file and email replication as well as duplicate Internet-facing servers, terminal servers, call center connections, telephone servers, spam filters and call center and ATM connections.
MORE
Read more about virtualization at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
IT Managers Discuss Their Strategies For Saving Their CUs Money
How One CU Gets Two Servers For The Price Of One Using Virtualization
Under the Microscope: Virtualization’ Will Reduce IT Costs
For info on this story:
* www.sfonline.org
* www.vmware.com (c) 2008 The Credit Union Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.cujournal.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
