Merit Virtualization Seminar a Great Success

Keynote Address

Richard L. Villars, vice president of storage systems and executive strategies for the consulting firm IDC, delivered the key note address to begin the seminar. He provided an overview of the IT industry with relation to current and future business practices in the troubled economy, closing his presentation with a look forward to the future of cloud computing.

Because IDC's industry analysis features communication with every stake-holder in IT decisions, Villars was able to synthesize the virtualization outlook from the executive (CEO, CFO), department head, and IT administrator perspectives.

"The key to success in these poor economic times is better customer relationships," said Villars, conveying the common consensus of executives across the board. Contextually, customers take the form of library cardholders, employees of State-funded agencies, as well as the faculty, staff and students of educational institutions.

"New business realities indicate that it is now time to de-capitalize IT," he went on to say. "CFO's want to get IT assets off the books." Villars pointed out that airline companies no longer own their own fleet, opting to lease them instead; while, Lehman Brothers, the ill-fated financial firm, reportedly amassed 90% of their liquidation value in IT equipment.

With increases worldwide in the energy costs and management of data centers, the maintenance of servers is becoming increasingly expensive—expenditures that are rendered excessive when one considers the benefits of server virtualization.

Virtualization can account for an 80% decrease in the number of servers in a data center (consolidating 90% of pre-existing equipment and hardware). On average only one physical server is needed for every four to five virtual servers.

Of course this efficiency is not without its headaches for IT administrators. Overloaded arrays, over-provisioning of capacity, a disrupted back-up process and a massive increase in workload are only a few potential dilemmas.

But if the process is executed correctly, these worries are alleviated. Organizations today are virtualizing to consolidate—cutting energy costs and extending the life of datacenters—but also to improve the mobility of their operations. Virtualization provides an ideal amount of flexibility to manage assets in upgrading, repairing and disaster recovery. Further benefits include: better control of data, improved utilization, availability and reliability.

Villars concluded his address with a bit of clever wisdom. "Virtualization is the gateway drug," he said. The logic behind the latter is that once members of an organization grasp the benefits of virtualization, they will want to virtualize more and more resources and data until physical devices are nearly nonexistent.

And if virtualization is the gateway drug, then the sky is the limit for Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is an emerging IT trend, enabling real-time deployment and delivery of IT products, services and solutions over the Internet. Villars acknowledged that the demand for the Cloud will be fueled not by IT professionals, but by business units and departments. He added that even your organizationmay soon find itself in the Cloud business as a Cloud provider, citing on-line lecture content, 50-year storage-life of medical records and various other plausible applications that service providers in any sector will see the benefits of upgrading to the Cloud.

Featured Speakers Share Insight, Inspire Success

Debra Allison, Interim Vice President for Information Technology of Miami University (OH), detailed her institution's successful virtualization endeavor, highlighting important precautions for other organizations to consider with regard to virtualization efforts of their own.

In Allison's experience, internal organization is key to implementing a virtual transition. "Having a well-functioning governance structure is a wonderful thing," she said. Concise documentation of funding requests and approvals go a long way to ensure that a project gets off the ground.

The success of Allison's virtualization effort has taken Miami University to new heights. Before she assumed her role, Miami was slated to construct a new datacenter—a project with a staggering a $20 million price tag in the midst of a budget deficit. To avoid potential disaster, Allison consolidated the existing datacenter by deploying IBM Blade servers which require far fewer cables, saving power and AC. She freed up even more floor space through virtualization. When you add these cost reductions to the money retained through not leasing or building a new datacenter, the Miami University virtualization project totaled over $15 million dollars in savings.

Allison invited VMware to Oxford, Ohio, for two weeks of on-site training with Miami's IT staff to ensure a smooth transition. The project should be completed in the coming months.

The seminar was privy to three top-level staff members of the State of Michigan Department of Information Technology (MDIT). Aparna Agrawal, Eric Haas and Rick Hoffman together delivered a comprehensive presentation on the DIT's implementation of storage and server virtualization.

The MDIT is unique in the sense that the department operates without a state-funded budget. Their operating revenues are derived from state agencies enlisting their services. With that said, they approached their virtualization effort as an opportunity to improve their service across the board.

"Our clients wanted virtualization yesterday," explaimed Agrawal. She was speaking to the fast-paced nature of IT, and the ways in which the MDIT viewed virtualization as a way to react faster to the needs of Michigan's citizens and businesses.

To maximize the benefits of virtualization the state deployed a clever tiered data solution for storage content. As time passed, they noticed data was retrieved less and less. They decided upon managing their storage according to its value. Stored data is moved accordingly from online to inline, nearline and then finally archived over a 90-day time span.

The State presenters also delineated the differences between file-based virtualization and block-based virtualization—each enabling specific benefits. The MDIT's approach to file-based virtualization requires almost no administrative support, allowing archived data retention policies to be programmatically controlled and enforced. Whereas block-based virtualization allows for ease and speed of provisioning and reduces levels of unused physical storage.

Thanks to the efforts of Agrawall, Haas, Hoffman and the rest of the MDIT staff, the MDIT was able to reduce direct charges to their constituent agencies by 16%, reduce server hosting times from months to weeks and dramatically improve their disaster recovery availability and process.

With benefits such as these, it's easy to understand why the MDIT now employs a ‘virtualize first' policy with all incoming information.

Marianne Lease, Enterprise Account Manager of VMware, made sure that no one was mistaken: "This is not a VMware infomercial," she declared. And though her presentation conveyed useful information, she remained true to her word.

Lease provided the perhaps underutilized perspective of a market representative on the IT dilemma of today. Citing recent surveys of CIO conducted by Meryll Lynch, "customers are still moving ahead with virtualization in 2009 in spite of the poor economy," she said. "And they are doing so because it is an excellent investment."

The benefits are simple and measurable. Organizations employing virtualization strategies are experiencing cost reductions of approximately $7,500 per workload on average (which really adds up for large organizations). These savings account for simplified infrastructure management and greater utilization resulting in lower server and operating costs.

Because virtualization has established itself as an excellent way to reduce carbon footprint, there is a growing trend amongst state legislatures to issue server virtualization rebates to organizations who make virtualization a priority.

Michael Chahino and Phil Howard of Elgin Community College (IL) spoke to the ways in which virtualization aided the business continuity and disaster recovery of their institution. Elgin Community College, in addition to servicing approximately 20,000 citizens continuing their education, serves as a community access point. That means that they offer free public internet access to anyone in the greater Elgin area.

Inheriting a mired and inefficient system, Chahino set to work putting in place a new disaster recovery system that his operators could truly feel comfortable with and manage with confidence.

"It is important to truly assess your assets and liabilities before beginning any disaster recovery process," said Chahino. Both he and Howard acknowledged that a good disaster recovery strategy should account for the smallest of spreadsheets as well as the largest of data centers.

"One size fits all, is an incomplete sentence," said Howard. Instead, all encompassing is much better. So rather than picking out individual elements to be backed up, they aggregated everything into one "bucket," taking advantage of snapshot back-up processes—and gaining the ease of knowing the exact location of everything that could ever need to be recovered in the process.

The recovery plan Chahino and Howard completed has been a huge success, not only in the security and availability of their data, but in the seamless transition with which it was implemented.

"When the end-users don't notice what IT is up to, that is an indicator of optimal success!" Chahino exclaimed to a chorus of laughter.

Rodney Mach, of HiperLogic and the Ann Arbor Virtualization Users Group, discussed some of the finer points of desktop virtualization. Essentially, desktop virtualization breaks the physical chain of an operating system (e.g. Vista or XP) and virtualizes it.

The antecedent scenario for desktop virtualization is the cost of PC ownership. Studies estimate that the average IT spending on desktops is nearly $100 per year on energy and $300 on maintenance—that's per individual computer, think how many PCs your organization runs and operates.

Imagine rather than contacting the tech support department to fix a problem resulting from a virus or unresponsive application, a member of your organization instead simply presses a button to instantly receive a fresh desktop with their pre-existing configurations and preferences. With desktop virtualization, this is a reality.

Schools and organizations with many employees stand to benefit a great deal from this convenience and efficiency. Desktops can be created on-the-fly, upon students' first log-in. They can be created when employees arrive at work and destroyed when they leave the building—beginning precisely where they left off the previous day when they return again the next morning with no loss of data.

"Desktop virtualization allows users to check-out a desktop to a local machine, just like you would check-out a book from the library," Mach explained.

As this technology is just reaching maturity there are still some minor set-backs. For example, full-screen video is still a problem because Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) cannot support Flash, and the only viable solution won't support full-screen applications. And VECD licensing requires a small fee to be paid to Microsoft. Also—obvious but perhaps overlooked—if the network is down, there is no desktop.

Todd Phelps, Assistant Director of Operations/Client Support and Charles Tuite, Lead ECM Architect of Ball State University (IN) completed the presentation portion of the seminar with an informative talk on their virtualized solution to Ball State's enterprise content management (ECM) dilemma.

Phelps and Tuite were charged with updating an outdated, overextended system, one with multiple points of failure and no document retention or disaster recover capability. On top of all of this, the existing system had no support for the Mac platform—which is becoming increasingly effective in the realm of higher education.

Fortunately for Ball State, these two IT professionals were up to the task. They underwent a meticulous approach in which they first determined what content was going to be managed; deciding that web-based content would not, while indexed images in TIF format would be converted to TIFF and managed, PDFs and COLD reports would also be managed.

From there, Phelps and Tuite assessed what factors would be used to make further selections. Based on speed, flexibility, reliability and scalability, they chose to virtualize Ball State's Integrated Facility for Linux.

"We decided that if our attempt was going to be successful, we would have to build upon what we already had in place," said Tuite. Virtualization helped resolve datacenter issues pertaining to space and cooling.

Phelps and Tuite were able to provide Ball State with a scalable and reliable system. Thanks to their staff the system is self-sufficient as well. They enabled IT with the ability to manage the deletion of documents within the system, as well as the ability to retain them. Disaster recovery is easily implemented and testable and Mac users are now supported.

In addition to system upgrades, their virtualization efforts have spurred a University-wide effort toward efficiency. The Teachers' College on campus was plagued by physical data storage, so much so that the entire top floor of the building was dedicated to housing old information. The virtualization solution freed up the entire floor so that it could be better utilized by the faculty.

For Phelps and Tuite, success was achieved in the preliminary. Their recommendation to the audience was to do their homework: a thorough study of potential software and notes about file locations and system defaults. They also cautioned the audience to never begin the instillation process without first testing on a system that is identical to your production system.

Initial success in their virtualization efforts has inspired Phelps and Tuite to set high goals for their institution. In the future, they would like to see Ball State University become a center of ECM Excellence.

Roundtable Discussions

In Closing