Solving the Server Proliferation Challenge:
A Case Study
How a financial services company reduced costs
and the number of Intel servers
through virtualization technology and server consolidation
Conseco Finance Corporation, a St. Paul, Minnesota based company, faced the challenge that many organizations face today -- how to manage the rapid proliferation of small Intel-based servers throughout the enterprise. These servers were being used for a variety of purposes, mainly Windows-based applications, such as antivirus services, encryption services, domain controllers, etc. Conseco was acquiring Intel servers at the rate of about one per week, so the systems administration and management challenge was growing continually.
An Infrastructure Challenge
However as the number of servers was growing, another problem surfaced: server underutilization. Many of the Intel servers were not being used anywhere near capacity because the applications typically required only a fraction of the available resources. Yet, placing more than one application on a single server was usually not a viable alternative due to the technical challenges associated with running more than one application on a single instance of the Windows operating system. As a result, Conseco was living with a large amount of waste and inefficiency in their Intel server infrastructure, which can be measured in real dollars.
The VMware Solution
This led Conseco to decide that the "madness" had to end. They embarked on a mission to find a solution to this server proliferation challenge. And they found VMware, a virtualization software company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. VMware's products allow users to carve up a single Intel box into several smaller "virtual" servers, each of which can run a separate Windows or Linux application.
For example, a four-way (that is, four-processor) Intel server can be divided up into 12 virtual servers (partitions), thereby providing the capability to run 12 separate applications. The partitions are completely isolated from one another and can each run different operating systems, including Windows 2000 and Linux. Furthermore, the virtualization technology from VMware allows system administrators to allocate processing power, memory, and disk space as needed to the applications running inside each virtual partition. To the application, the virtual machine looks just like a physical server.
The VMware solution enabled Conseco to control the runaway proliferation of servers and improved their resource utilization substantially.
Server Virtualization Considerations
Of course, virtual servers are not appropriate for every type of application, such as those with extremely high processing requirements or which definitely need more than one processor to run. But server virtualization products like those from VMware can certainly address a sizable number of applications and help organizations use their servers more efficiently and cost effectively.
Another consideration is understanding that running multiple applications on a single box heightens the concern about the hardware becoming a single point of failure. However, the VMware software can address that aspect as well, via its "snapshot" functionality, which creates online backups to lessen the risk and ease the worry.
Hardware to Meet the Demands
Nevertheless, the solution to the server proliferation challenge was not limited to the leveraging of virtualization technology. The host servers needed to be leading-edge Intel servers with demonstrable savings in total cost of ownership. For that, Conseco turned to the IBM eServer xSeries 440, a powerful and high-performing system with tremendous manageability and scalability, noted by most industry experts as the premier Intel server on the marketplace.
Conseco recently acquired five x440 servers, each with 8 processors, and together with VMware ESX Server software will create 135 virtual servers. Consolidating servers at a factor of 135 to 5 may seem incredible, but the powerful combination of industry-leading Intel servers and virtualization software made the job not only feasible but also measurable in concrete, validated benefits.
The Final Result
Today Conseco is realizing savings in the areas of hardware, floor space, server maintenance, systems administration and management, and network connectivity. In addition, Conseco no longer has to buy a separate copy of backup software for backing up each individual server. Instead, it buys just one license for backing up the entire host box. Conseco has estimated that its annual total cost of ownership has been reduced to approximately $4,500 per server from $10,400 per server (estimates based upon a sampling of 32 servers running in a virtual environment).
But the Conseco story does not end there. To extend the benefits of server virtualization, it made sense for Conseco to consider virtualizing their storage as well. Conseco turned to DataCore Software Corporation, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida based company that specializes in storage virtualization software. Their SANsymphony product allows a user to create a networked storage pool from which they can allocate virtual disk space to virtual servers. The result is more efficient use of storage resources.
The key to a successful implementation of virtualization is to fully understand the memory and performance characteristics of the applications running on virtual servers in order to get the best results. Together, virtualization and a sound server consolidation plan can help solve the Intel server proliferation challenge and bring hard dollar savings to the bottom line.
Credits/Acknowledgments:
This article is the result of information compiled from Conseco Finance Corporation and a December 3, 2002 Computerworld article written by Jaikumar Vijayan.
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January 15, 2003
