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The City of San Diego boasts a 55 per cent virtualized IT environment, with plans to take out another 100 physical machines from the data centre by 2010. The hardware cost differential post-virtualization.

Before the City of San Diego became a 55 per cent virtualized IT environment, its biggest IT challenge was server sprawl and underutilization of hardware.

The integrated service providers with which the City of San Diego worked support their application on particular hardware, so the environment couldn’t be mixed and matched, recounted Rick Scherer, virtual infrastructure architect with the City.

“We have a number of servers utilizing three to 10 per cent of the CPU and memory resources,” explained Scherer. And, because of the ISV setup, he added, “we had a one-for-one in our physical environment.”

The one-server-to-application ratio also meant that the City was challenged by high procurement costs, on average about $7,000 for the hardware alone, said Scherer.

It’s always great to read how organizations are utilizing virtualization as a platform for organizational and technical transformation. Looking at the server estate, understanding which components could be easily virtualized, how we can achieve more efficiency, more value from our hardware can be the first step to virtualization of the server estate with impressive results.

Of the top of my head in the enterprises, I would be looking at the back office IT systems, those management, script, generic ghost servers that don’t appear to be heavily utilized to prove the concept and from there we can move on to ‘client’ servers, those application servers and illustrate the technology working without impact combining the right level of chargeback and flexibility with the platform possibilities and ownership in delivery.

A great article, do check it out, the more we talk about the benefits of the concepts, how we got it working for us, absolve ourselves of the technicalities at the higher level, the hypervisor choice debates etc, the more relevant we can make it to the stakeholders, putting the technology, the business benefits across to the right target users in the right way.

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