How I Slashed Costs with Virtualization Management Software

Network World — For Service Corporation International (SCI) embracing virtual server technology from VMware meant relinquishing visibility into the entire environment.

"It's difficult to determine the effect a virtual environment has on, say, the disk system you have in place because there is a blindness that comes with the virtual system," says Kevin Brown, infrastructure manager at SCI, the nation's largest deathcare product and service provider in Houston. "You need various pieces of information that are no longer reported in a similar fashion. With virtualization, the enterprise system became sort of black box that I couldnâ¬"t fully see."

Brown, who has watched the VMware environment grow to 8 ESX Servers and about 175 virtual machines, says he needed a tool that would report on all the elements—such as hard drive capacity, disk space, operating system status and more—in such a way that the information could be correlated into meaningful data for him and his staff. For one, he wanted to be able to quickly drill down into issues that may crop up and secondly he didn't want to watch the finger-pointing process that has played out across enterprise environment for years waste time in the virtual world as well.

SCI was able to cut their budget by 50 percent and reported $1.5 million in savings on hardware and maintenance within 6 months so Brown realized he needed to find a better way to manage the new environment.

"The monitoring tools we had in place couldn't give us the details needed to track application performance," Brown says.

That's when he started to look into products from vendors such as Akorri. The company's flagship software, BalancePoint, provides visibility across applications servers and storage by discovering, collecting and analyzing information across those domains. It consists of two modules. The Examiner module expands on VMwareâ¬"s VirtualCenter management capabilities and gives end-to-end performance information for ESX Server and virtual machine guests. The Analyzer module identifies points of resource contention and allows IT to optimize performance, but analyzing performance and capacity utilization over time.

Brown says BalancePoint's ability to collect data from disparate systems and report it back to various IT staff members in a standard way help them to more quickly determine the root cause of performance issues and better optimize virtual resources. By revealing how storage and databases perform on the back end, Brown says BalancePoint enables his team to better understand the virtual environment and the resources it consumes.

"Being able to right-size disks and perform accurate capacity planning now because we have the data to do it is invaluable," he says. For instance, with BalancePoint in house, SCI expects to further reduces its IT spend. According to Brown, the company anticipates reducing administration costs by $400,000 and cut resources in half my moving from a 50-to-1 to a 300-to-1 servers-to-administrators ratio.

"The data is out there, but Akorri makes it easier to get at it and make sense of it, which saves staff time and speeds trouble-shooting, both things we need right now," Brown says.