Fighting Physical Server and Storage Sprawl with Virtualization
by Paul Rudo on 10/11/10 at 4:18 am
With virtualization technology, you can consolidate many servers into one server or storage pool. IT consolidation
The numbers of servers that must be managed by the average company is quickly rising, and datacenters are becoming more bloated.
Servers purchases are made based on functionality requirements, rather than resource requirements.
A company may buy a Linux Server for their web site hosting, a SharePoint server for their document collaboration, an Exchange server for their company emails, and a simple file server for flat-file data.
This means purchasing 4 separate boxes, each with a specific function, and all highly under-utilized.
The web and SharePoint servers might only ever utilize a small portion of the processing power and storage space. And yet, the file server and Exchange server will probably require hardware upgrades to keep up with data storage growth and increased usage.
This leads to inefficient resource allocation and increased maintenance & labour costs.
Also, having many different boxes requires a lot of space. Because datacenters are expensive to build, most of them have very limited space. This means that IT administrators need to be very selective in minimizing the size of their physical infrastructure.
And it’s not enough to just shove boxes in wherever they’ll fit. A server needs breathing room. Although a typical server rack only takes up about 6 or 7 feet of floor space, you need to set aside at least 20-25 square feet of breathing room for ventilation and cables.
Finally, you need to consider the power and cooling costs associated with running your datacenter. Power usage is increasingly becoming an area of concern for IT professionals. A recent report by Gartner said that the world’s IT industry collectively used more energy and produced more greenhouse gases than the Airline industry.
Reducing energy consumption is not only good for the environment, but it’s also good for business. By simply using your IT resources more efficiently, you can easily reduce energy consumption to save thousands of dollars per year… with little or no capital investment.
Next time you want to deploy a new database or enterprise system within your organization, take the money you were going to spend on a new physical device, and see if it can be better spent virtualizing your existing systems and deploying the server in this new environment.
You’ll end up making better use of your IT resources, saving money, simplifying IT administration, and helping the environment.
Sean O’Leary
Nov 28th, 2012
Externalizing BLOBs shrinks databases by up to 95% and bypasses SQL bottlenecks for BLOB I/O. Lean databases and fast content file I/O speed up SharePoint performance.