Virtualization Case Study. The Billion Dollar Database

Transcription

1 Virtualization Case Study The Billion Dollar Database

2 Our Client Our client is a leading provider of specialised working capital solutions, providing consulting, advisory and technology services to multi-national companies. They have developed an invoice discounting/securitisation/factoring platform. They license this software to medium sized banks who run it for themselves. They operate a SaaS offering for those who do not wish to run the platform in-house. Their core application is a data warehouse processing 10B of transactions every day from around the world.

3 Their Estate An Estate Of 2 Halves In-house IT, including development and testing systems for software engineers. Customer facing SaaS infrastructure. ~50 physical servers in total. Belt & Braces Approach to DR Dual site disaster recovery between office location and data center in Docklands. Mainstream Hardware Mostly Dell, with some Sun systems, mixture of NetApp & local storage. Old School Data Processing Rigor High level of automation/batching for mission critical systems, seasoned IT team, finance background, making full use of NetApp advanced features for storage.

4 Pre-existing Server Estate Dell PE 6650 Dell PE 1850 Dell PE 1750 Dell PE 2600 Dell PE 1950 Dell PE 2850

5 The Triggers Power Co-location services are priced on power consumption Power costs are rising rapidly No more power or cooling at the office site Space Out of space at the data center & tight at the office Lifecycle Dell s business is a just proxy for selling new processors So hardware maintenance is priced accordingly after year 3 Business Flexibility When a new client needs to be up and running they count the days! Source: Ofgem London Rack Pricing per Rack per Month Source: The Co-location Exchange

6 Services Provided Virtualization Assessment What can I virtualize, where are the problems, what might the ROI be? Virtualization Design How can I virtualize, what would the project cost exactly, how soon? Implementation Hands-on implementation, project management, proof of concept, production Training Provided on-site using their running infrastructure Support Provided UK working hours, Monday to Friday, with escalation path to L3/vendor

7 Virtualization Assessment A Typical Picture Of Underutilization Server Estate CPU Cores Server Estate Memory/Gigabytes Aggressive Case Virtualization Utilized RAM Moderate Case Virtualization Current Estate Physical RAM NetApp Filers/Terabytes Server Estate Storage/Terabytes Utilized Disk Utilized Disk Physical Disk Physical Disk

8 Virtualization Assessment An Excellent Case For Consolidation Virtualized estate using hardware appliances would conservatively reduce OpEx by 80% OpEx reduction is derived largely from reduced hosting and co-location costs, also includes reduction in hardware maintenance. Reduction in soft costs (people time, other efficiencies) form no part of these calculations.

9 Design & Implementation Continuation Of Dual Site Disaster Recovery Setup The virtualized platform was designed to fit with existing DR procedures, scripts, etc N+1 Redundancy Within Each Site Single system failure has no immediate impact on In-house or SaaS Minimum Hardware Deployed Client pursued an aggressive virtualization policy. Minimizing the number of hardware platforms required to run their workloads due to their requirement for lowest OpEx. Implementation The entire estate could have been reduced to 2 systems. 4 allowed for full DR. Training & Support

10 VMCO Virtualization Appliance A Specialised Hardware Appliance Virtualization gets you from many pieces of hardware to few. VMCO appliances get you to the fewest. Small size & power footprint, highest density VM/watt & VM/rack ~5-7 year operational lifespan increases ROI and defers disposal costs Designed for high uptime, hot standby RAM, N+1 PSUs, Solid State Storage Big Systems Discipline For The x86/x64 World Performance management, capacity planning, and environmental monitoring software Tuned hypervisor (XenServer or VMware), tuned Firmware. No moving parts. Field Service Hardware field service from Computerlinks, a 600M T/O technology distributor with UK call centers and field service engineers in major cities in 15 countries.

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12 One Year On The Project Was a Huge Success, 6 Month ROI OpEx was reduced sharply, the last of the physical servers are being retired. Business Agility Has Increased Time to provision a new SaaS customer has been reduced, IT are able to experiment freely with deployment scenarios. DR/BC capability has increased, infrastructure availability is 100% through N +1 design. The Business Has Expanded Significantly The Client Has Deployed Additional Appliances Their initial deployment of 2 appliances per site has increased to 5, allowing for tens of new clients to be serviced with no significant increase in company OpEx. Original VAR Continues To Supply Professional Services

13 Takeaways Virtualization, Right Time, Right Place For some years now, the upfront purchase price of a server has been only a minor cost when compared with the operating expenditure required to power, cool, maintain, manage, and finally dispose of it. These operating costs are going up, not down. Virtualization is an antidote to these unfavourable economic realities. Virtualization Is Changing Hardware Low average utilization of hardware (not just CPU, RAM, storage) is leading customers to want to increase the liquidity of these items, sharing them out among many workloads. (Ref. Xigo, 3Leaf, VMCO, and others). Every year CPU vendors put more virtualization helpers into their chips. Fewer Systems = Concentration Of Risk Better make sure your infrastructure is properly designed, built, and implemented, and your staff are qualified to operate it. Think scrupulously managed IBM mainframe not sprawling tangle of disposable Dell boxes.

14 Questions

15 A Word About Power It now costs more to power a server over its lifetime than to buy. In some cases it costs more to power a server for 1-year than to buy it! Power costs will rise 10% per year for the next 5 years just to pay for green initiatives*. Expect increases as natural gas supply declines (*)Source: Ofwat Source: Ofgem Source: The Co-location Exchange