Virtualization
Maximize virtualization ROI
Lens maker sees savings with consolidation solution.
A further benefit of virtualization is the ability to perform infrastructure maintenance on an as-needed basis, regardless of time of day.
Based on previous
experience, Steve Baxter, director of
regional IT for Americas for CooperVision,
knew that elements of virtualization within
select development and production
environments could be the answer to address
the rapid growth of the company.
"Our growth, externally
as well as internally, was massive," he
says. "That included the sheer number of
servers brought into the environments,
including six major enterprise-level
applications brought online in just the past
two years alone. The key challenge remained
finding the best way to reconcile our
business growth within the physical limits
presented by our current infrastructure."
CooperVision, a unit of
The Cooper Companies, is one of the world’s
leading manufacturers of soft contact
lenses. To meet the growth challenge, Baxter
decided to use services from VIRTERA to
assess the company’s infrastructure, and
recommend and install virtualization
solutions.
"We arranged with VIRTERA
to perform, in cooperation with VMware, a
30-day assessment of our server farm and
provide a report that showed the utilization
of our servers and the cost benefits accrued
from virtualizing," says Baxter. Leveraging
VIRTERA’s vendor-agnostic Virtual Operations
Framework (VOF), the assessment showed that
many of the company’s systems had a 7
percent utilization rate across all servers
and were candidates for consolidation.
"The report grouped
likely servers that could benefit from being
virtualized, at a ratio of approximately
14:1," explains Baxter. "While that was
impressive, the larger justification was the
ability to translate, using that formula,
how much we could save over a three-year
period in maintenance and total cost of
ownership."
According to Baxter, the
benefits of moving from a largely physical
environment to a hybrid, physical-virtual
one include: increased operational
efficiency; reduced hardware, power and real
estate;reduced downtime, both planned and
unplanned; accelerated software testing and
development; and support for growth of
remote offices.
"With VIRTERA’s support,
we selected a group of servers to virtualize.
We then purchased the actual solution
through VIRTERA, contracted their consulting
services and worked closely with them on
design and implementation, including
storage," says Baxter.
Additional servers
unnecessary
VIRTERA also worked
closely with Baxter and his team to bring up
the initial clusters, as well as help to
virtualize the first dozen boxes–not only
newly purchased servers, but also moving
existing servers from physical to virtual
environments using the VMware Physical to
Virtual (P2V) tool.
Baxter initially targeted
approximately 30 existing servers to be
migrated into the virtual environment. As
the initial phase was being rolled out, a
request for an additional 30 servers to
support several new applications associated
with company integration was received. Based
on the progress that was already being
achieved, Baxter quickly put the brakes on
ordering additional servers.
"We needed to look at
virtualizing our existing servers and seeing
what we had gained in terms of availability
and performance before we purchased any
additional hardware," he explains.
"We already had enough
horsepower in house, based on the
consolidation that was underway," Baxter
adds. "In a sense, that’s why we did the
virtualization in the first place, to gain
control and visibility into our server
inventory before we made any further capital
investment."
A further benefit of
virtualization, as Baxter discovered, is the
ability to perform infrastructure
maintenance on an as-needed basis,
regardless of time of day.
"One of our biggest
initiatives is minimizing downtime. Being in
28 countries, we are a 24/7 shop. As a
result, there really are no maintenance
windows," he says. "We recently upgraded to
VMware 3.05. Now we can complete maintenance
efforts during normal working hours with
minimal downtime."
VIRTERA also helped
Cooper-Vision’s storage needs by taking the
lead with the company’s primary vendors, EMC
and VMware. Additionally, VIRTERA consulted
with Baxter and CooperVision to migrate a
host of applications from physical to
virtual environments, including: financial,
order entry, SOX compliance, enterprise
resource planning, forecasting and planning
systems.
"Anything that we can
possibly integrate into the virtual
environment we have," says Baxter. "We’ve
even gone so far as if a server or box isn’t
really a good candidate for virtualization,
we still maintain a one-to-one relationship
from our ESX (VMware server) to virtual
server just to gain the benefits of having
the system virtualized and being able to
recover it on demand."
Significant benefits
A year into the
virtualization initiative, Baxter has
realized a host of benefits.
"At this point, we have a
little over 100 servers virtualized, with an
additional 100 in queue for future
migration. We also have several fairly
mature clusters that are running both types
of servers, as well as approximately 250
virtual desktops," says Baxter. "As we look
out over the next 12 to 18 months, as we’ve
built this clustered environment, we are
beginning to ask how we could leverage it
for disaster-recovery purposes."
Baxter says CooperVision
also is planning to host approximately 200
virtual desktops based in upstate New York
for the benefit and use of the company’s
Asian sales offices.
According to Baxter, the
ability to retain greater visibility and
control over bandwidth was a benefit that
stood out, "Historically, if we needed to
add RAM to a server, it was an elongated
seven-step process. Now, we are able to
accomplish this process in just 15 minutes.
The RAM is ‘virtually’ available, and all we
have to do is reallocate it and give the box
a quick reboot."
As for the ROI realized
from making this internal transition, Baxter
says his savings will only increase. "Taking
into consideration what we’re saving on
cooling, UPS power, administration, ongoing
maintenance and newfound agility, our real
savings, over three years, could well
approach or even exceed one million
dollars,"
he says.
For more information
(click here)
Endpoint virtualization rising
by Brad Rowland
In a typical
organization, managing the use of a vast
array of different endpoint devices can
cause IT administrator headaches and cost
the organization real dollars–not only in
the resources expended by the IT team trying
to solve compatibility issues, but also in
the lost productivity of users having to
cope with less-than-optimal computing
environments until the issues between their
devices and the organization’s applications
are resolved.
For example, more than a
quarter of the respondents in a recent
survey said at least 40 percent of their
organizations’ IT resources are spent on
managing operating system and application
delivery to endpoint devices. Another 31
percent said their organizations spend at
least 21 percent of their IT resources
tracking software licenses for endpoint
devices. Both of these are issues that
endpoint virtualization excels at
simplifying and reducing associated costs.
Endpoint virtualization
technology can separate valuable information
from the operating system and applications,
so that managing the myriad of virtual
endpoint devices becomes easier, and thus
less expensive.
A major concern of many
would-be endpoint virtualization adopters
has traditionally involved the incapability
of the associated supporting technologies.
Network reliability and bandwidth both
directly influence how effective endpoint
virtualization can be within an
organization.
The industry has improved
in this area significantly in the last five
to six years, and the cost of these
supporting technologies has also been driven
down. The behind-the-scenes technologies
needed to ensure positive ROI from
implementing endpoint virtualization are
approaching the level many IT administrators
view as acceptable. Major endpoint
virtualization vendors also are realizing
the need for a standards-based approach to
accomplishing the many IT chores endpoint
virtualization is tasked with.
One of the overall goals
of endpoint virtualization is to simplify IT
management. The problem is that most
management solutions on the market are only
capable of managing traditional or virtual
environments, but not both. In order to
effectively manage their infrastructures, IT
administrators who have implemented endpoint
virtualization have to use a medley of tools
to keep all the environments in their
infrastructure–traditional, virtual and
hybrid–in check.
A solution to this issue
would be to have multiple tools from the
same vendor using multiple methods to manage
all possible environments; another solution
would be one tool that uses multiple
management methods or one solution that uses
one method to manage all possible
environments. This final obstacle is proving
to be the most formidable one in the path of
greater endpoint virtualization enterprise
penetration.
Brad Rowland is director of enterprise marketing, endpoint virtualization, Symantec, Cupertino, Calif.
For more information
(click here)