The Challenge
As a business, IPL is looking to make long-term strategic decisions regarding its IT infrastructure. COO, Bruce Whall explains, "We currently have 14 servers in production, which for a company our size is excessive and costly. With many of our servers either out of warranty or end-of- life, it's time to look at replacing them." He continues, "The high cost of running so many servers is an ongoing concern, and with ever escalating IT requirements our key objective is to reduce operational expenditure and increase utilisation without sacrificing functionality."
The cost to IPL involved in running so many servers includes not only the capital costs of purchasing the hardware, software and vendor warranties but also includes the power consumption, ancillary cooling systems and even floor-space needed to house the systems. In addition the server maintenance and support is outsourced and charged on a per node basis.
"For us, the concern is to develop a strategy for turning over our equipment while simultaneously taking advantage of new technologies that will be suitable to help us to continue delivering high quality IT services to our employees. We want to do this all at a substantially reduced capital and operational cost," Whall explains.
The Solution
In consultation with Brennan, IPL developed a strategy which fundamentally alters the existing systems architecture by transitioning from a traditional one-to-one server model to a virtualised platform. Virtualisation technology allows multiple virtual servers to run on the same physical hardware, taking full advantage of available system resources to improve overall network ultilisation, while reducing power consumption and CO2 emissions.
For IPL, embracing virtualisation would mean replacing their older physical infrastructure with three new industry-standard servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and using Microsoft's new Hyper-V virtualisation technology. Hyper-V is a hypervisor-based virtualisation architecture bundled as a feature of Windows Server 2008 and containing everything needed to virtualise multiple diverse operating systems; Windows and Linux amongst others, on a single server whilst fully leveraging the flexibility, scalability and enhanced management of a virtual platform.
This would ensure IPL is able to reduce the number of physical servers that support its infrastructure without compromising the level of service they provide. It also allows the company to reduce upfront capital costs whilst having the added benefit of reducing ongoing power consumption and cooling, hardware maintenance, and support costs.
The Results
IPL is an ideal sized business to take advantage of the Windows Server 2008 product. As an SMB, the lower cost Microsoft Windows Server 2008 product is very attractive when compared to other virtualisation solutions on the market and the tight integration of Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 ensures a reliable, cost-effective and flexible approach to adopting a virtualised infrastructure.
As Kristian Yench, Senior Consultant at Brennan explains, IPL can also enjoy enhanced security and compliance as a result of its move to Windows Server 2008. "When consolidating multiple servers on the one physical host, security becomes paramount since servers are now responsible for multiple mission critical systems. Fortunately, Microsoft's new product has addressed this danger with its micro- kernelised hypervisor architecture which is inherently secure as it offers a minimal attack surface and does not incorporate any third- party code."
He adds, "the product's inherent compliance with Microsoft's hardware compatibility list will also ensure ongoing vendor driver support well into the future."
Looking forward, IPL intends to leverage additional functionality that the new solution provides to improve the company's overall operations.
"Because Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V support Windows clustering, IPL is now able to duplicate data on multiple servers which is a more effective and proven high availability model. In addition, Hyper-V's native support of Volume Shadow Copy Services will enable IPL to implement processes for rapidly recovering data in the event of system failure," explains Yench.
He adds, "Should IPL need to deploy new servers in its operations area, using virtual templates will ensure that new servers can easily be remotely deployed and operational very quickly at significantly reduced setup cost."
