Building a fluid and efficient data centre through virtualisation

Managing a data centre is not the easiest thing to do and the burden of being accountable for arguably the most important function of a modern day company, its data centre, is pretty daunting.

With business continuity and disaster recovery provisions for organisations becoming no longer a luxury but a serious necessity, most IT departments face major challenges in trying to manage and maintain data centre with high quality services to their internal and external users whose requirements are ever changing and constantly demanding.

Application and system software are generally expensive and electricity consumed to power and cool the data centre throughout every day of every year is enormous. When these are finally put in black and white against the annual IT budget, the equation is compelling and equally frustrating.

“It’s a no brainer that after all these expenses very little money is left for the company to invest in solutions that improve efficiency or productivity of their data centre. So if the root cause is inefficiency why not think inside out? You would rather have an efficient system at the core that will save money than shell out extra rupees later to improve an inefficient one,” said Shane Gunasekara, Manager – Virtualisation and Storage Practice at Greenwich.

The modern management observes the IT department from a cost/profit centre standpoint and with a tight budget approved annually and piling capital and operational expenses, the job of running an IT department couldn’t be more challenging. So how do we make data centre more efficient from inside out? Consolidation and containment using server virtualisation is now a universal remedy and a value for money investment. Although Cloud Computing may be getting the headlines, that hasn’t diminished interest in building new data centre. “We constantly see a lot of companies revamping their data centre, acquiring new hardware and investing in bigger business software applications,” added Gunasekara.

Server virtualisation is a framework or methodology of separating the operating system and its applications from the underlying server hardware. In essence what happens is the underutilised CPU, Memory, Network and Storage resources of an individual server is exploited to run multiple ‘virtual’ machines independently without any complication.

“If 10 machines were running on one physical box, to the outside world and the virtual machines themselves it is as good as they were running on 10 individual physical machines,” explained Gunasekara.  A whole gamut of business and technical benefits are offered among, cutting down server provisioning time by 90 per cent, easy centralised management with one pane of glass, powering down production servers for housekeeping and maintenance activities while users are still connected, provisioning on demand resources, intelligent load balancing of server workloads, saving electricity up to 40 per cent per annum, saving capital and other operational expenses up to 60 per cent per annum,  utilising valuable time saved of IT staff for more productive purposes, etc.

“This is what we refer to as the ‘Internal Cloud’ with the IT staff having choice, control and flexibility to dynamically configure and manage computing resources for their users which they previously had a hard time wrestling with,” said Gunasekara.

Today many servers the world over are virtualised and companies enjoy the massive technological and financial benefits from the practice. Intelligence giants like Gartner and IDC predict that by the close of 2012 over 50 per cent of enterprise workloads will be virtualised.

Technologies like next generation storage, desktop virtualisation and application virtualisation compliment and leverage on server virtualisation to form a highly efficient, manageable, resilient, flexible, scalable and fault tolerant data centre. Building from inside out gives you another chance to revamp your data centre into a more sustainable one that can withstand the lightening pace of technology.