At Your Virtual Service
Thinking about buying new servers? It may be time to go virtual.
VIRTUALIZATION tamed Bryant U's server chaos-and saved significant bucks.
FOR YEARS, ‘CROWDED' was the best
word to use to describe the state of the server
infrastructure at Bryant University (RI).
As recently as 2004, the school had 84
physical servers spread across campus.
Some of these units were in server rooms,
tucked snugly into server racks. Others were
standalone units next to other big machines. A
handful of them were barebones personal
computers, whirring in the back of a department
office. According to Art Gloster, vice
president for information services, the school
had so many servers, it didn't even know how
many there were.
Naturally, when the Board of Trustees started
pushing for Gloster to centralize IT, he
knew he had to make a change. After auditing
the network to see how many servers were
out there, Gloster opted to consolidate. With
a bankroll of $1 million (and various flavors of
hardware and software), he got all of the
servers onto five machines.
"To say that we eliminated redundancy
would be an understatement," he asserts, noting that the
school's consolidation ratio was roughly 15 to 1. "Technically,
we still have 84 servers, only now they're all sitting
on five machines."
What Is ‘Virtualization'?
This process is known as virtualization, and schools across
the country are using it more and more to consolidate
resources and improve efficiencies across the board. The
benefits of this approach are undeniable: Fewer resources
means lower overhead and, ultimately, reduced costs.
The notion of server virtualization is nothing new: In the
days of mainframe computers, technologists termed it
"partitioning." Back then, one machine might house five or
six virtual servers. Today, because physical servers are
smaller and boast exponentially more computing power,
it's easy to fit dozens of virtual servers on one machine.
Technically speaking, virtualized servers mask certain
resources from particular users. IT administrators use a
software application to divide one physical server into
multiple isolated operating systems and environments.
The administrators then program the software to grant
certain access levels to predetermined users, in the OS of
their choice.