When IXIS Capital Markets planned its relocation from a Big Apple operations center last year, IT managers didn't worry about the risks of transferring dozens of servers to Jersey City. And that's not because they hired good movers.
Each of the servers, which provided disaster recovery redundancy for IXIS' systems, was shipped over virtually-with all applications, data and operating systems re-provisioned to counterpart hardware across the Hudson. Instead of physically moving the server, and spending days configuring rack space and cooling/power requirements, the firm was able to transfer data off in "a fat file," says IXIS vp and systems architect Mornay Van Der Walt. "At the end of the day, we were able to relocate those across the wire."
By using virtualization, a technology strategy which distributes unused computing resources into "virtual" ones, Van Der Walt says IXIS "turned around a service in five hours...so based on the time we saved, that was an 80 percent [labor] cost reduction."
Provisioning ease is just one of many benefits touted for virtualization, a rapidly trending IT move for corporations wanting to squeeze the largely untapped capacity out of modern x86 servers-which may run no more than 15 percent of total resources in standard use. By layering a virtualization platform across server architecture, two servers can suddenly be stretched into four, six, 12 or even more virtual servers. Besides saving energy and rack-space costs, companies save hardware dollars when expanding data centers or reconfiguring disaster recovery plans.
Parag Patel, senior director of Ecosystem Alliances for EMC-owned VMware, estimates that in a typical data center deployment of 1,000 servers, companies using virtualization can build up to a 12-to-1 ratio of virtual machines to actual servers. In capital and operating expenditures, the savings over first three years "comes to a little more than $13 million," says Patel. "Those are big numbers."
Besides VMWare, Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystem's Solaris are part of the fray offering virtual machine software. Newer players like XenSource and Virtual Iron Software are also making a play at the platform level, while application vendors are establishing strategies to take advantage of virtualization deployments. BEA Systems announced in December it was shifting product strategy to empower the use of Java applications on top of virtual machine OS layers, which are called "hypervisors."
Surveys from Forrester Research show 40 percent of companies in 2006 used virtualization, up from 29 percent in 2005. Of those polled, 47 percent last year were financial services firms, one of the highest vertical rates. Gartner research predicts more than half of corporate servers will be virtualized by 2009, compared to only 5 percent of the market today being addressed, says Tom Bittman, Gartner's chief of research. Even with that small penetration, the industry's vendors are racking up revenue. VMWare "brought in $708 million, which is double over the year before," he says. "Just do the math. This is a huge trend and growing rapidly."
Virtualization is only catching on in the server because of the popular ascent this decade of x86 processor machines in the ops center. Older mainframes on UNIX run at 80 percent capacity.
Even with virtualization, IXIS Capital still is only averaging about 45 to 60 percent host utilization per server. That leaves plenty of room for further resource consolidation that Van Der Walt says is in the plans. "We haven't extended our virtualization infrastructure to the remote offices yet."
