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Virtualization and consolidation: a one-two play

Virtualization and consolidation are accepted mechanisms to tackle exponential business growth and they are also a good example of IT getting involved with business. CIOs have a great deal of faith in these two technology tools. By Faiz Askari

For organizations that want to succeed in today’s marketplace, IT heads or even CEOs of aspirant organizations need an IT environment that shows them the exact status of their business—one that responds to business demand by dynamically supplying computing resources as required. For such demands, CIOs are opting for the one-two punch of virtualization and consolidation. Let us analyze the acceptance and understanding of this technology as from the perspective of an IT manager.

Many Indian companies have undertaken server consolidation projects. ERP instances running on standalone servers in different geographical locations are being consolidated down to a single instance. Also the virtualization of servers for development, testing and production environment of an ERP system is also gaining momentum. However the adoption of server virtualization for multiple applications is not moving at the same pace. T. G. Dhandapani, CIO, TVS Motor Company Limited said, “The main reason for this is the high investment cost that is needed to acquire virtualization technology which is not commensurate with the savings, in system administration cost at Indian pay scales and other savings. Also virtualization is still considered as an IT-centric project and CIOs may find it difficult to convince CFOs.”

RD Malav, General Manager IT, Subros India said, “I would love to have the best of the breed cow, to fulfill my present as well as future milk requirement, in term of the right quality and quantity on time, in place of mixed breed animals of different age group on my farm for the same or lower levels of quality and quantity of milk. In addition to the above, I shall be able to care better with fewer cowherds, which turns out to be an inexpensive yet high quality solution.”

Further defining the key attraction of virtualization and consolidation for an IT head, Dhandapani said, “Basically server consolidation and virtualization helps a CIO manage TCO. Virtualization enables the CIO to remove the physical, geographic and organizational boundaries for sharing compute servers. Traditional data centers support local business units with many standalone computers performing dedicated functions for specific applications. Through data center virtualization, the dependencies to specific machines are removed by allowing applications to compute where servers are available on a global basis. The consolidation of servers and data centers is cost-effective.”

Consolidation and virtualization help save money, ensure better business continuity and optimize various services. Avnesh Jain, Sr Manager Systems Hero Honda Motors India Ltd said, “Virtualization improves server utilization, efficiency and manageability. So better server utilization can reduce the cost of hardware and manageability becomes easy. Hence it can also reduce the overall TCO.

“The ability to migrate virtual servers from one virtual environment to another without considerable difficulty makes management easier and provides DR capabilities as well. An organization’s rapid growth generates the need for new business applications and this need is increasing day by day; to make it happen you need more servers, storage and so on to cope with increasing volume and velocity of information. Organizations need to adopt Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) which relies extensively on virtualization.” The technology can improve IT resource utilization and increase flexibility in adopting to changing requirements and workloads. With the addition of service-level, policy-based automation, virtualization leads to RTI.

Citing his own experience in deploying a consolidated IT environment, Ganesan Ramadurai, Senior Manager – IS & Business Solutions, RFCL said, “Our assessment of the market determined that HP was the best choice for an IT partner on the grounds of portfolio, technology and relationship management. The team managed to deliver a smooth, stress-free implementation with no cost or time overruns. In our case, HP’s understanding and the resulting consolidation exercise have helped us realize the goal of providing effective business solutions while ensuring the optimization of our IT capital investments.”

Open source virtualization

There are many organizations that have picked an open source environment for their IT infrastructure. Indo Asian is one such organization that had moved completely to an open source environment from a Windows or licensed software model. Vikram Ranade, Vice President, Technology at Indo Asian Fusegear Ltd. said, “We are completely on Linux and open source. Frankly, this has given us a great option to move to a virtualized environment. We did not face any problems whatsoever while moving to a virtual environment. The primary reason why we chose a Linux-based infrastructure and more interestingly, the reason why we moved to a virtualized environment is because we understand the importance of data.”

As of now Indo Asian has 33 primary servers, commenting on this, Ranade added, “In such an environment, we do not have blades as they do not give us the right value proposition. Moving to a virtualized environment has been a good experience for us, however.”

While talking about the challenges or hurdles that have been faced in getting a virtualized and consolidated environment in his IT set up, Malav said, “To maintain different technologies and applications an organization requires a larger team of technology managers with varied skill sets. Higher levels of spares inventory, the risk of frequent technical obsolesce are other problems. Moreover it is also a big challenge to recruit and retain technology managers.”

The migration

There are two aspects to any IT migration, first the hardware and then the application have to be changed. It becomes critical to discuss both elements of a migration to get a clear perspective of how you are going to get into a virtualized structure. Commenting on both types of migration, Malav responded, “Application migration is a bigger challenge than hardware and yet it is part and parcel of CIO’s life in any organization. IT is a fast changing industry and there is no other option than to keep pace with the industry by way of regular upgrades and migrations.”

Giving an example of consolidation in the data center, Jain said, “If one is planning to go in for data center consolidation, one should use simulation technology that allows you to experiment with alternative scenarios and determine in advance what will work and what will not. It is a great way to ensure that a business reaps the full benefits of data center consolidation without any application or IT service suffering.”

Giving a different slant on the topic, Dhandapani said, “Migration is always a painful process, however, there may be a quantum of benefit that an organization could enjoy after the exercise. This is because the migration of major projects will call for business downtime.”

While advocating the open source way, Ranade said, “At the desktop level, we do not have any kind of problem in getting to a virtualized environment. We did face some minor issues on the application front but they have been sorted out in the initial phase itself. Collectively I can say that migration was not an issue.”

Talking about the specifics of these two technologies, Suresh Menon, Product Manager, Business Critical Systems, HP India Sales said, “A virtualized infrastructure enables the creation of virtual servers that automatically grow and shrink based upon the service level objectives (SLOs) set for each application that they host through tight integration with partitioning, high availability and utility pricing. However, our offering named VSE, allows a CIO to maintain service levels in the event of downtime and to pay for spare capacity on an as-needed basis.”

Virtualization solutions can also provide intelligent control of your virtualized environment through integrated planning, management and automation, allowing a CIO to consolidate multiple applications on a single server and manage clusters as one entity without compromising performance. “Our VSE utilizes all available server capacity while providing the highest priority applications with additional resources during peak times,” Menon said.

While talking about the technological attractions, Menon added, “HP’s VSE can also increase an organization’s server utilization to 60 or 70%, it can also keep an organization’s services up and running. Moreover, it enables you to bring new services and applications online faster.”

faiz.askari@expressindia.com