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What are the top virtualization benefits?
My IT director is trying to convince me to approve funds for a server virtualization project. He's explained that over time it will lower hardware costs and improve efficiency, but has still been very vague about everything. Can anyone tell me what are the top benefits that your company has enjoyed since virtualizing your servers? If it has cut costs, can you give me an estimated percentage?
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5 Answers
The financial benefit can only be derived from the context of the problem being solved and challenges your orgnization is trying to solve. The figure would depend on a several things such as business problem or risk being addressed, what else will be changing as part of the virtualization (people, process, tools) project, and the size/scale you are working with/on.
That said I have used virtualization in the following contexts (where cost savings or cost reduction were definitely part of the business case). For similar activities the costs reduction or savings will vary by organization.
* Improve performance of certain applications that benefit from parallel processing. I have used Virtualization to solve performance problems where simply adding CPU and memory to a single machine didn't help improve performance as much as when we "split" job processing across muliple virtual servers (i.e. scaled wide). This was very evident with ETL processing for BI systems.
* Reduced the need to over provision on capacity. Virtualization (depending on technology used and configuration) can be used to dynamically allocate CPU and Memory between applications at critical times when capacity is required. This becomes especially useful for applications that experience usage spikes for short periods but otherwise have low usage. Good example may be financial applications and reporting systems that may experience spikes during quarter close periods or event registration systems that experience spikes a few days before event kickoff. Investing in high performance physical server that is 10% utilized most of the time my not be the best use of money.
* Faster capacity provisioning. There is typically a higher larger investment on virtual infrastructure hardware, but once in place, virtualization can enable you to provision servers, cpu, and memory much faster and easier. Capacity planning can be a little more challenging in the sense that resources are shifted around much more frequently, however, that too is precisely the benefit of virtualization. Capacity isn't wasted where it isn't required, and as business needs change, virtualization ensures that platform changes are not too expensive. Shutting down and starting up new services can be alot easier.
* Archival and storage of legacy applications. After an M&A there are typically legacy applications that will no longer be used by the business on a regular basis but must be kept available on-demand for audit reasons. The requirments for how long applications or application data must be kept available will depend on business needs, legal and complaincy requirements. Keeping applications and their servers running (i.e. powered up, monitored, and patched regularly) when they are not required to be up for day to day business can be expensive (data center power/cooling, license, and administration costs). Servers also take up space in data centers that could be used for new more business critical services.
* Keeping data center costs low. As pointed out in the previous point, data center power and cooling costs can be minimized through virtualization.
* etc
All is above is true, also provide you a D/R option at a lower cost.Still you have to look your goals. I found this for you to read to put balance in this thread.
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7015
sw
I would do an assessment of your data center before you explore virtualization.
There are alot of variables that need to be looked at, storage, network, servers and their applications etc.
Hi Christy,
Some Virtualization Basics:
1. It improves hardware utilization.
2. It’s a major part of green computing.
3. It can significantly reduce operating costs.
4. It can make your organization more agile.
5. It can be helped by modern hardware.
6. It can complicate application-licensing costs.
7. Its initial cost varies widely.
8. It increases management requirements.
9. It’s offered by multiple types of vendors.
10. It’s not suitable for all applications or users.
Cost reduction depends on your actual infrastructure.
BUT, if your are looking for COST REDUCTIONS, I will advise Converge Infrastructure platform that doubles administrator productivity, with payback in less than a year. (Several implementations by myself have this average numbers)
Increased Business value by
- Reducing administration costs by 29%
- Decreasing downtime by up to 77%
- Reduce cost of common data tasks by up to 40%
- Improve recovery time by 80% or maybe more.
- A 4:1 network consolidation reduces costs by up to 75%
Hope this can help you.
Hi Christy,
your question is extremely important. Unfortunately my response comes quite late, but hopefully it will be of help for someone else.
Let start a preliminary remark: which benefits matter the most depend on what are your objectives, so there cannot be a perfect answer without first knowing your targets.
Generally speaking, the most important benefits of a server virtualization project are intangible, and seeing that intangible assets value is difficult to quantify, it is difficult to assign a numerical value to the benefits of server virtualization projects. For these intangible benefits I would recommend a qualitative ananalysis rather than a quantitative analysis. Qualitative analysis can be as rigorous as quantitative analysis provided a scientific methodology is applied.
If the focus is on finanncial savings then the top benefits are
- reduction of HW maintenance costs
- reduction of power consumption
- reduction of datacenter floor space usage
- reduction of network IO and disk IO ports and devices.
Please note that we have shown in an analysis based on real customer data that the sheer HW maintenance savings are enough to justify the project in the sense that the Net Present Value becomes positive on a four years time horizon.
For more on the financial analysis and on the intangible benefits see http://www.itdec.eu/SystemVirtualization_Overview.html and references therein.
I hope this helps.
Mauro
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