E-cost efficiencies
By KELVIN DAVIS
Kelvin Davis is the director of Greymouse which is cloud service provider that supplies high quality, time bound ad cost efficient services through its own facility in Fiji.
Advice on how your virtual journey
can develop and prosper
“Gee, I am glad to see you again”, George came over and shook my hand at a conference held last month. “The increase in Electricity prices, are starting to hurt and I need more savings from my IT.”
George is an old business colleague that I have not seen for six years, so we sat down over a meal, sharing the changes in the respective business worlds.
We discussed ways he can save money and give his business a better technology experience. He has four physical servers, in his air conditioned room, being used by sixty staff fromMonday to Friday.
Manytimes IT is treated as just a cost center, with ever increasing expenses and not considered as an integral part of the business.
Working with business owners like George we can shift the understanding, receive strategic business value.
I often witness computer resources wastage, so shared with George my ideas on reducing wastage and increasing the business agility.
Consider that most corporate servers use;
• 15 per cent (or less) of their processing
power.
• Memory resting 70 per cent of the time
• Hard Disk sized for three years ahead
• Each server electricity consumption of
550 – 850 watts
• Server air conditioning 24 * 7
Multiply this by the four servers and you can clearly see the business case for physical consolidation.
3 Stages of Consolidation
There are three stages of virtualisation, where the business benefits from consolidating the four different servers into one physical box.
Cost efficiency
The cost efficiency comes from buying one (slightly larger) server and running a virtualisation program. These virtualisation options include;
1. ESX (VMWare) http://tinyurl.com/
VMware-vSphere-Hypervisor
2. HyperV (Microsoft) http://tinyurl.com/
server-cloud-Hyper-v
3. XenServer (Citrix) http://tinyurl.com/
citrix-products
We then shift the old physical server into the new virtual environment as part of a “physical to virtual” relocation.
The old server is then removed.
Process is repeated until there is only one physical server left. Immediate savings include reduced IT production costs;
• One server purchased (not 4)
• Power consumption decreases by 60 per
cent – 70 per cent
• Less heat, air conditioner works less
(power saving).
Quality of service
Once consolidated and savings started, the business usually looks at server redundancy (in the event that the one server fails).
A second physical server is purchased and software to switch across the virtual servers to the second physical server.
This can take a few minutes (or longer depending on the virtualisation software) ensuring the quality of the IT service is higher, and the business becomes more productive.
A higher availability suits many businesses depending on their reliance on IT.
Electricity savings decrease, however it is offset by the greater staff and efficiencies received.
Business agility
This stage is to provide business with the capability to use “Infrastructure as a Service” (IAAS) providing applications internally.
Larger businesses use this to provide interdepartmental billing, track resources utilisation costs. This simplifies the IT costs making them departmental specific.
Imagine your IT department able to supply a new server (for example to a marketing department) with additional benefits.
• Resources within a few minutes
• Available to use within about 1 hour
• Quick and easy inter department rev
enue for the IT department
• Remote management
• Private or public cloud integration
YourJourney
George only needed to progress to stage two the “quality of service”. I called George last Friday to check on his progress.
“Thank you again, we need to catch up every six months for another meal. My savings are worth it.” George said laughing.
Like George, your journey into this (virtual world) starts with the link, software is available at no cost. http://tinyurl.com/VMware-vSphere-Hypervisor.
Shortlink:
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