Baseline Magazine - January/February 2009

still-to-be-determined costs by reducing data center space by 40 percent, consolidating 220 servers into a dozen.

Alcatel-Lucent is anticipating similar success. Through virtualization and consolidation and the phasing out of legacy applications, the company will cut its server count from 10,000 to 7,000. There have been challenges: Some employees in various departments aren’t accustomed to having their designated servers outside their building—much less possibly in another country—and culturally, there’s always the resistance to change. Despite these issues, the effort is proving worthwhile. For starters, the company expects server-utilization efficiency to increase to between 60 percent and 70 percent, up from between 10 percent and 30 percent.

“We want to push virtualization as wide and deep as we can,” says Cliff Tozier, vice president of infrastructure for Alcatel-Lucent, based in Paris. “We can no longer afford for every application to have its own environment. Virtualization has allowed us to dynamically increase capacity in days or hours. In the past, it would have been weeks or months.

“We also are seeking to be more flexible in meeting business demands because of the tremendous growth we’re seeing in video and messaging across the enterprise, and virtualization has allowed us to do this. We can [provide] services on-demand so developers can get quicker access to computing power for projects.”

A Virtualization Covenant

MEETING THE CHALLENGE

Despite the many benefits of virtualization and consolidation, there are inherent challenges, including additional costs for training and consulting. For certain, there is a learning curve in adopting these tools.

“You need trained staff that understands the technologies and can manage the transition from today’s data center to the virtualized one,” says Justin Perreault, general partner with Commonwealth Capital Ventures, a Waltham, Mass., consulting firm. “These skills are still in scarce supply. It’s the old problem of trying to replace the engine while you’re driving down the road at 60 miles an hour.”

Richmond, Va.-based Genworth Financial, a Fortune 500 global financial planning company, recently decided to make the transition now. It was running out of data center space because of server sprawl, and the cost of power and cooling in that space was too costly.

Working with virtualization/consolidation tools from companies such as VMware, HP and Dell, Genworth is now seeing a dramatic increase in productivity: It has reduced its average under writing cycle time—from when a client application is received to when a policy is issued—from 45 days to 10 days. An added benefit is that the switch hasn’t negatively affected network operations or security, and, in some ways, it has benefited those areas.

“With respect to security, the patching, hardening, password and anti-virus procedures are the same for virtual servers as they are for physical servers,” says Michael McGarry, Genworth CTO. “Virtualization allows us to build out the environment quicker and enables us to put more servers in smaller spaces than we ever thought possible. It eliminates tape backups for disaster recovery, and individual backups are provided in a much smaller footprint.”

AT COVENANT HOUSE TORONTO, ABOUT 4,000 YOUNG people a year can stay for weeks or months at a time. Many of them have left their homes—or moved to Canada from other countries—without a means of support. Here, they can get meals, medical attention, counseling and even vocational training.

Like any organization with 200 employees, Covenant House has concerns about keeping its data protected and accessible 24/7. For example, fundraising accounts for 80 percent of its budget, and data related to that effort is maintained on the network. That’s why it recently completed a major storage virtualization project using DataCore Software’s SANmelody as implemented by DataCore partner Interware Systems.

As a result, Covenant House has more than doubled its available storage capacity, while reducing the number of physical servers from 10 to three using VMware. At the same time, the organization has increased its ability to safeguard its data from disruptions and disasters, and it has reduced the amount of power needed to keep enterprise operations running.

“This assures that we reach our goal of 99.99 percent availability for our users 24/7,” says Wendy Craig, who oversees information systems. “It allows us to manage our infrastructure much more easily, too. Before, it could be difficult to oversee a bunch of physical servers with storage spread all around, especially when the servers break down. Now, because our server and storage management is centralized in one location, we can deal with all problems from the IT manager’s desk, without needing to take down the entire system.”

After deciding on a virtualization solution, Covenant House centralized data at a downtown Toronto location, replicated a copy of that data and stored it at a co-location facility a few kilometers away. Data related to everything from the latest fundraising figures to day-to-day e-mail exchanges is replicated every night at the co-location facility. Moreover, DataCore optimized the organization’s existing storage assets by addressing the problem of having some application servers over-allocated with storage, while others were underserved.

Next up: a desktop virtualization project using virtualized server technology that will allow traditional desktops to be replaced with thin-client hardware, saving a projected 97 percent in energy bills.