University Business - January 2009 - (Page 30)

5 2. Reasons to Switch to Virtual 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.” 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.” Maintenance, however, is where virtualization offers a whole host of benefits. “Now that everyone is up on the learning curve, our technicians can easily bring servers up and down, upgrade operating systems, or allocate resources or disk space to different servers. We have a whole lot of options,” says Carpenter. Before, when they needed a new server, they had to find or buy a piece of physical equipment. To reuse a server, they would have to put it in the rack, connect it, plug in the wires, and then configure it. Today they bring up the virtual software management console, click on a button to create a new server, and choose the operating system. What used to take two or three days now takes an hour or two. No longer does e-mail go down for three days while the staff performs upgrades. Carpenter can’t sing virtualization’s praises high enough: “If your tech team is spending time crawling behind racks, hooking Sustainability-minded students at Seattle University (Wash.) need not worry about the IT team doing its part to save energy. up wires, and turning down assignments because they take too much time, consider virtualization,” he advises. Server virtualization eases disaster recovery. Like its peers who have implemented server virtualization, Trinity Washington University (D.C.) is enjoying financial savings and energy efficiency. “We reduced our hardware spending by 87.3 percent, and we’ll be able to reduce our electrical costs in our data center by 82 percent,” says James Tagliareni, director of Information Technology Services. “In fact, we did an ROI and found that virtualization paid for itself in less than five months.” Tagliareni, who considers himself “old school,” likes to ensure that his decisions are sound. “I really dug in to this, and the only negative I’ve found is the learning curve of getting my staff up to speed. Otherwise, it’s a really good solution.” One benefit quickly discovered was that virtualization greatly improved disaster recovery. “In September, a server went down. Another server instantly picked up where the other left off. There was no down time, and the end users never knew there was a problem.” Virtualization allows his staff to take snapshot-like images of entire servers, so in a worst-case scenario, with the replica set up to be restored automatically, it would take only minutes to restore a full server from scratch. Before virtualization, when a server went down, the school suffered. During Tagliareni’s first week at Trinity, 3. Thanks to virtualization, if a disaster were to strike the Trinity Washington University (D.C.) campus and cause its servers to go down, the fix would take just a few minutes and the community would hardly notice. Before virtual servers, it once took two days to get two failed servers back on track. 30 | January 2009 universitybusiness.com http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - January 2009

University Business - January 2009
Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Money Matters
Financial Aid
Community College
From Data to Information
5 Reasons to Switch to Virtual Servers
Finished in a Flash
Internet Technology
What's New
End Note

University Business - January 2009