WHEN IT COMES TO SERVERS, YOU CAN have too much of a good thing. Just ask Carsten Puls, vice president of strategic and product marketing for NComputing. “In the past, we needed a different server for every function: internet, e-mail, enterprise resource planning.” As a result, the data centers at NComputing, which offers desktop virtualization solutions, became overloaded with servers. And each server—because it typically performed only one function—used only a portion of its processing capability. In fact, Microsoft reports that the typical server-utilization rate is about 15 percent, with 85 percent of server capacity going unused.
Then came server virtualization, which allows IT departments to consolidate multiple servers onto one machine. “Essentially, server virtualization is efficiency in computing,” says Puls. And that one machine uses up to 90 percent of its capability.
Chellappa Kumar, chief information officer at New York Institute of Technology’s New York College of Osteopathic Medicine, points out other inefficiencies in running multiple servers. “Every server needs to be patched or maintained, which takes a lot of time,” explains Kumar, who is also an associate professor at the school. “A virtual machine has a better-defined environment, so it’s easier to care for server-based applications.”
In addition, buying and configuring a new server every time a professor asks for a new website, for instance, is a poor use of time and resources. “Ordering and then installing a new server can take up to six weeks,” says Kumar. “With virtualization, there is no new hardware each time. I can add to an existing server and be up and running in three hours.”
However, server virtualization is not without its faults. As with any new technology, there is a learning curve. Also, security is a work in progress. “The security piece is not fully developed,” says Kumar. “In three years, we’ll be more comfortable. For now, we need to be cognizant of that fact.”
Intrigued by the promise of server virtualization? Here are some other reasons that colleges and universities have made the switch.
1. Server virtualization lets institutions be more environmentally conscious.
When SunGard Higher Education joined forces with Seattle University five years ago, there were plenty of individual servers running individual applications. “We looked at how much power we were drawing and what the university paid to run the data center,” says Bo Vieweg, director of IT at the university, which outsources its IT functions to SunGard. “As a Jesuit school, one of our goals is to be more sustainable.”
After doing a bit of research, Vieweg and his colleagues decided to virtualize “just about everything except our ERP system,” he explains. That meant virtualizing the institution’s web servers, database servers, e-mail servers, and file servers. Vieweg’s team built the environment and began doing individual migrations of physical servers to virtual machines. Over the last four years, they’ve moved 55 servers onto virtual machines and are down to only a small number of stand-alone servers.
“We’ve had more than a 40-percent cost savings in power and are down 25 percent in maintenance costs,” says Vieweg. “This is a perfect, easy, ‘green’ win for everybody, as well as making sense from a financial perspective. The time for server virtualization has come. You almost have to come up with a reason to not do it, which I don’t say very often.”
2. Server virtualization saves time.
Before implementing virtualization with Novell Open Enterprise Server, the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University (D.C.) had a typical setup: two or three server racks with 20 to 30 stand-alone servers, each running one or two significant applications or programs.
It took about a year to get the virtualized servers set up and working properly, but John Carpenter, chief technology officer for the business school, shares that his team continually discovers advantages they didn’t originally foresee. “We didn’t fully realize that when you build a virtual server, you can copy from one server to another. It’s a much simpler process than changing a gazillion standalone machines.”
