No more hiding in the server room

Information Technology in a Recession, From Here on Out....

We all Know as I.T. Professional's that we don't make money for the companies that we work for, so if companies could help it, we would be the first to go in this recession with jobs being at an all time low. Think about it, if your company has 5 Helpdesk Professional, 3 Network adminstrators, 2 Network Engineers, 1 I.T. Director, and 1 Cheif Technology officer, Thats about 3.5 million in Salaries for I.T., wow! Now the really costly part of I.T which is the Equipment to make things work, let say you have arond 300 Physical Servers, 650 Workstations, with Maintence agreement contract on all servers and desktops, along with your Phones, this could be upwards to around 5 million dollars. This is all Cost, which makes the CTO, and CEO freakout when spending money. What if you turn 300 Physical Servers in 10 Physical Servers, and 650 Workstation into Netbooks, and This will cut the Maintence contracts, the Management of servers, and also cutdown on how many I.T. Staff you need to manage your infrastructure, now you can have 2 helpdesk instead of 5, 2 network administrators instead of 3, and so on, and so on. Virtualization is becoming a computing standard and is elimating the need for alot of overhead. from here on out if your not familar with Virtualization and how it works here are a few of the big Players in the game.

www.vmware.com The Leader in The virtualization world

www.xensource.com Citrix Xenserver fastly becoming a giant in the game

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx Microsoft's Hyper-V becoming very competitive very fast.

With all this Said, Learn, achive, stay ahead, stay relavant, Don't Let Virtualizatioon pass you by.

Donald Terry

Comment by John McGrath on April 16, 2010 at 2:38pm: I understand the thrust of your argument, but the logic does not work as you suppose.

Virtualization is a way to consolidate servers, yes, but your example reduces your physical server presence to 10, that would mean approximately 30 servers to 1 physical machine. Running a minimum of 2G of memory for each VM, that would be 60GB for the VM's alone. Processing power efficiency will drop the more VM's you add to a Server, this is an inescapable fact. Assuming the cost of new Servers to run these VM's, your costs go up for the first year, and of course there will be service contracts for years to come.

Management of Servers will not decrease, because of Virtualization. Your enterprise will still have the same amount of manageable servers, just not physical ones.

Replacing workstations with netbooks works best in small enviroments, not the enterprise. Light, portable, and fragility add to the cost of maintenance. The cost of maintenance between laptop/netbooks and Workstations/desktops are not equal.

Replacing hardware does not equate to reducing Manpower costs. If fact, it could add cost, due to the increased maintenance of equipment.

I agree that Virtualization is the wave of the future, but it is a tool, not a turnkey solution for the CIO/CTO.

Comment by Dan Yasny on April 20, 2010 at 2:08pm: I wonder why, when mentioning main virtualization players, Red Hat wasn't mentioned. RHEV has all the competitive features and evolving very fast

As for the article, there are things you simply cannot virtualise yet. Not to mention the requirement for more expensive hardware, which would support VT/AMD-V, a lot of RAM and a SAN solution for VM migrations. This is of course dwarfed by the high ROI virtualization has, but not every CTO will be compelled by that argument

Comment by Donald Terry on April 20, 2010 at 2:14pm: @Dan I do agree somewhat about the support for VT/AMD-V as well as Ram. But Although Redhat's Virtualization or Hypervisor may be a great Product its not widely used, probably because Redhat hasn't really put alot of Marketing around, and the same could be said for Sun Mircosystems "VirtualBox".

Comment by Donald Terry on April 20, 2010 at 2:21pm: @John Mcgrath, my post has no accuracy to what a CIO/CTO would be thiking or be doin with his I.T. department, also this is to be said for the examples i used on the servers and workstations, but with Desktop Virtualization and Servers Virtualization, they Both Cut Cost and Over Head of support over a Helpdesk, and Power Consumption.

Comment by Dan Yasny on April 20, 2010 at 2:22pm: Actually, comparing RHEV to VirtualBox is like comparing a neightborhood 7/11 to a large supermarket.
VirtualBox is much like VMWare's WS/Server or MS VPC - a local VM tool. RHEV is a full scaled VM management, just like ESX or vSphere.
Anyhow, the use base is not very large yet, since the product was GA'd in the end of 2009, but it's growing very rapidly.

Comment by Donald Terry on April 20, 2010 at 2:24pm: I understand your point about he Comparison, lol. But I was speaking from a Marketing Prospective. Not Functionality.

Information Technology in a Recession, From Here on Out....

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