Virtual Data Center in a box for one million

How good is virtualization market? According to Gartner recent Data Center Conference poll 94% of IT organization is going through some sort of virtualization. 80% are either in the process of server consolidation project or have already completed one. Only 3% of the poll respondents had no plans on virtualization. 40% of the polls said their data center run a combination of mainframe, Unix, Linux and windows servers. 25% runs Unix, Linux and windows servers.

In an earlier survey of Gartner for enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, on an average there are about 87.4 data center sites. The survey also showed that most of them are looking to reduce this number by 58.8% average. The same story goes with mid-sized organization, with an average 15.3 sites reducing 44.4% to 8.5 sites.

Cost versus savings

Now, lets break this up in terms of servers. For a mid-size to large enterprises data center, on an average there are 350 servers of all sizes at any time. Alinen research says that on an average 100GB of storage is used by a single server. Comparing only 10% might be a SAN solution. According to Boyd Company recent Most affordable data center market, 2008 research, assuming an average size of 125,000 square feet data center, the annual cost of maintaining can range from $11-12 million, taking only the cost of land, labor, power and property taxes. VMWare TCO calculator shows 50% or more TCO savings on server and infrastructure consolidation savings in a given 3 year time.

Solution in a box

Here is a simple solution how you could consolidate your servers. In any organization, no matter how you interpret, the heart beat of any day is communication, and the most preferred way is email. An email Exchange virtualization is much easy way to start your server consolidation initiative. Other categories are your development, test and QA, backup and batch processing servers. These are servers that you utilize very minimal in your daily business cycle.

Reference Architecture

By consolidating all the high end servers into a virtual framework you could reduce or replace your low capacity servers by 50% or more. The high-end servers in combinations with SAN solution could create a high available and reliable solution in a box as show in Figure above. You could now extend this into a symmetric architecture to enable maximum availability architecture. Assuming Sun Fire x4100 series or Dell Power Edge 2900 series, and using VMWare solutions you could start putting an efficient and affordable data center solution in a box for one million.

About the author: Sam Chakkanat has been in management consulting industry since 1992. Prior to founding CEAUG, he was the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture practice at Agilex Technologies, servicing fortune 500 clients. Before that he was Enterprise Solution Architect and consulting manager at Oracle Consulting at their Platform and Performance Solution Architecture Group and had architect and managed multi-million dollar programs and business technology initiatives for clients. Mr.Chakkanat holds a bachelor's degree in electronics and communication engineering from Pune University. He serves as a though leader and subject matter expertise in multiple domains in IT strategy and Enterprise Architecture. He can be reached through our contact forum.