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GreenTips is a monthly Kiplinger Recommends feature from Greener World Media Inc., which writes environmental news and advice for business in a variety of Web-based publications, including GreenBiz.com, GreenerComputing, ClimateBiz and GreenerBuildings.
It's no secret that IT centers are often a company's worst and most expensive energy drain. And many of those firms are running out of space for their IT operations because of the equipment required to meet those power demands or other IT needs, such as more data storage capacity. To cut costs and avoid expanding or building new IT centers, an increasing number of businesses are turning to "virtualization" to get rid of old servers dedicated to just one application.
In this month's GreenTips column, IT expert Andrew Binstock discusses a promising new development that makes the process easier and even more efficient: servers built specifically for virtualization. Dell and Hewlett-Packard are leading the effort, and other hardware companies are following suit. Binstock tested two representative Dell servers to see how much of a difference it makes to use a virtualization server over a generic one. "These systems focus on the three areas that are most likely to affect application consolidation performance: They have lots of processor cores, lots of RAM, and lots of network bandwidth," he writes.
Binstock's overall conclusion is that any IT center ought to look into virtualization servers. His only caution is that for now, the benchmarking tools for measuring specifically how well these and other servers handle virtualization are relatively primitive, making it tough for IT managers to calculate just how much would be saved by upgrading to them. Improved benchmarking software could be on the way later this year, and he points readers to the best tools available now while explaining their individual drawbacks. "But in terms of absolute performance, for the time being, you'll have to do things the old-fashioned way: Examine feature sets and test the systems in-house, to the extent possible," Binstock says.
POSTED BY: jay (August 20, 2008 02:17 PM)
Wow,
You're right about the considerations but that's a surprisingly myopic perspective on virtualization. You've too harrow a focus on vendor, hardware and technology perspectives.
IBM's had z/VM on System z for about 60 years and PPC architectures as well and what about all the other virtualization solutions, e.g. Microsoft, Xen, KVM.
Even discussing at a specific vendor level (e.g. Dell / HP) is the wrong focus. Instead you should really talk about energy (which you lead with), HA/DR and ROI considerations which will drive the rest of the discussion.
It also misses the possible insights that "cloud computing" (EC2 for example) may bring bring to the conversation.
It's a good start but this is why if you're serious about virtualization and consolidation, you don't get your IT consultation from articles.
POSTED BY: IT Guy (August 20, 2008 04:23 PM)
The downside is that when the virtual server crashes, all applications go down instead of just the one application on a dedicated server.
POSTED BY: Peter (August 22, 2008 05:39 PM)
Why does everyone think that every app has to run on a dedicated server? You know what can save even more power and money than virtualization?... Run both apps on one box without virtualization! There's typically no reason (save for security in some special cases) why your app, web and DB's can't all run on the same box, and you may even get a performance increase since there's 0ms of latency when communicating to the box itself (as opposed to connecting via IP)...
Virtualization has it's place, but I'm getting tired of articles claiming it will solve all the world's computing problems and companies will save billions! Like all tools, it's good for some things, but can't do everything...
Virtualization can help with consolidation in some cases, but it's not *required* for consolidation, and it's not the most efficient or cost effective solution in most cases.
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