Taking Virtual Servers to the Next Level
Smart CIOs are using virtualization for much more than data center consolidation. They're becoming masters of flexibility—delivering results for the business like lightning-fast provisioning and greatly improved disaster recovery.
“That’s when a CIO moves from tactical to strategic,” Elliot says.
First, Thou Shalt Save A Lot of Money
Like Sanzone, many CIOs have realized that virtualization is much more than a cost-saving tool. But almost every CIO’s journey to a virtualized environment will start with a data center consolidation project—and big savings that provide a pleasant starting point with the business side.
Virtualization technology from vendors such as VMware (which owns about 80 percent of the Fortune 1000 market) acts as an “abstraction layer” between physical server boxes and the operating systems and software running on them. This means that up to 30 virtual servers can be housed on just one physical server, though that number varies widely from data center to data center (depending on how resource-hungry a company’s applications are, for example). CIOs can then create a virtual pool of computing power, which reduces the need for a huge number of servers and allows for much better CPU utilization rates (which typically run anywhere from 5 percent to 15 percent) in servers.
Out on the edge of the virtualization frontier are IT chiefs like David Siles, CTO of the Kane County government in Illinois. In addition to his server virtualization, data consolidation and disaster recovery successes, which he started in 2005, Siles has embarked on an ambitious desktop virtualization project.
Siles is about a quarter of the way through deploying VMware’s virtual desktop infrastructure to the county’s user base, which accounts for 2,000 PCs.
Those users who have started to switch over, including administrative folks, politicians and sheriffs, use thin-client terminals that are hosted back in the data center on virtual machines.
Although Siles says it’s still early in the changeover to calculate exact savings, he will eventually be able to cut maintenance, hardware and service costs because everything is controlled inside the data center. For example, each terminal cost him $600. But since he has been able to get 50 to 60 hosted desktops on each four-processor server, he has been able to cut in half each terminal’s cost. And, he notes, terminals boast an eight-year lifecycle, rather than a four-year one for a PC.
In addition, his four desktop staffers no longer have to make service calls to the four corners of the growing county (which accounted for two hours of driving time, in most cases).
Those thin clients—especially the 55 mobile units—now pose less of a security concern. “We had a couple laptops stolen out of police cars,” Siles says. “Now [with the virtualized thin clients], you essentially just lose a dumb terminal.”
