Out With Relics, In With Open Source

So with VMware commanding the enterprise virtualization market, why didn't Broadwater use the leader? "First, obviously, cost," Broadwater says. "VMware has a great solution, it's just very expensive. Second, we're a firm believer in and use a lot of open source. Not just because of cost but because of philosophy. We actually work on open source projects and give code back." Broadwater has been using open source tools such as the Apache Web server software for years.

As for why he went with Novell SUSE Linux, comfort played a part here. "We've had Novell in the data center a long time  nothing against Red Hat [and its Linux products,]" Broadwater says. "With Novell, I knew what my support was, I knew how to work that system."

"The plan is, within the next three years, to be off Solaris completely," moving over to as much Linux as possible on servers, Broadwater says. "I looked around at what I saw with my engineers. I told my engineers 'Every one of you knows Linux. If there's a problem with the base OS, if it's Linux, any one of you can fix it.' Today my Solaris guy can't fix Windows problems," he says. "It [virtualizing on Linux] also makes our disaster recovery a lot simpler."

What about the internal IT group politics of making such a broad change in OS strategy? Respondents to our recent survey, Your Virtualized State in 2008, ranked IT organization politics issues as their second toughest management challenge around virtualization, second only to balancing server workloads.

"We've always had a heterogeneous environment," Broadwater says. "They all knew Linux. We've had, obviously, some fear. Our Unix administrator has been supporting Solaris for 18 years. His job isn't going away; he's getting certified on Linux," Broadwater says. The small size of his IT group helps minimize the political battles, he adds.

As for what's next: By June 2009, Sesame Workshop also plans to virtualize its 10 non-critical, low utilization servers, some of which are running Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Some of these are one-application, one-server relics, a problem that many CIOs know all too well.

One example: "Our conference room scheduler has its own server," Broadwater says. "It's taking up space in my data center. It uses maybe 7 percent of the processor [in the server] and none of the memory."

One reason this resource-waster has hung around: The scheduling application requires Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Sevices) web server, Broadwater says. "Everything else we run runs on Apache [web server]," Broadwater says. Thanks to virtualization, application servers like this one will soon be a thing of the past for Sesame Workshop.