Wed, December 12, 2007 — CIO — Many CIOs wonder how far and how fast they can run with virtualization right now. Once you get an initial taste of the cost savings, flexibility, and speed of provisioning that server virtualization enables, you want to make a fast break for a larger victory. Vincent Biddlecombe, CTO of Transplace , doesn't wonder anymore: He just completed an instructive sprint.

Since mid-2007, Biddlecombe has virtualized almost all the production servers at Transplace, a third-party transportation logistics provider. (The company helps customers such as retail chain stores maximize efficiency in their supply chain and shipping activities.) And he's been running his company's most critical application—a home-grown transportation system—on a VMware ESX environment for a month now, with no major hiccups.

By the way, Biddlecombe didn't have any virtualization or VMware expertise in house among his 100 IT staffers when he started this project: "We were a Sun group," he says. To address this issue, he hired a consulting partner, Catapult Systems , to bring VMware knowledge to his group.

Timing is Everything

For Transplace, the 2007 sprint toward virtualization made sense on both a business level and a technology level, Biddlecombe says. The business desire: Transplace works with its customers via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) , so the company needs the best scalability, availability and manageability they can get for hosting customer data. Virtualization appealed for both disaster recovery and scalability reasons, Biddlecombe says. "We can simply add capability as we need it."

On the technology side, Transplace's internal systems were due for a facelift. In early 2007, Transplace decided to move its production data center from the corporate office in Plano, Texas, to an offsite co-location facility in nearby Dallas. (Transplace also has a test/development and disaster recovery facility in Lowell, Ark.) At about this time, the company was due to upgrade its server hardware, Biddlecombe says, so it made sense to roll out the virtualization effort with that server upgrade.

For Transplace's database applications, he switched from Sun servers (running Solaris) to IBM mid-range servers (p570 servers using the Power6 processor and running AIX). For Transplace's middle-tier servers, he switched from Sun servers to Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers, using VMware's ESX Server software for virtualization. (For storage, Transplace chose Network Appliance's FAS 3070 storage systems.)

"We wanted to provide an environment where we could have maximum availability between our production and disaster recovery data centers," Biddlecombe says. "By using a combination of VMware with the storage, we've effectively copied our servers out to the disaster recovery center."