Serving up a New Lease of Life on the Virtual Office Farm
by Nikole Manktelow
Australian Financial Review, June 6th, 2006
Virtualisation
is becoming more popular with small business as providers offer better
continuity and easy deployment, says Nicole Manktelow.
Better
known at the big end of town, virtualisation – splitting servers into
multiple virtual machines – is becoming popular and could change the
way many customers access services.
As the technique of making
one server act like many permits several groups of users to use the
same server, it greatly increases the efficiency of each machine.
"Virtualisation is a hot topic in the server area at the moment," Gartner Vice-president of research Phillip Sargeant says.
Breaking servers into multiple machines offers some important benefits.
"It's
a mechanism to improve the asset allocation of servers" he explains.
"Typically you would have one or two users on a server and the server
would be pretty under-utilised. In the virtualised model, you could
have a lot more users."
"Prior to virtualisation, it was
estimated that the average utilisation of most Intel-based servers was
20 – 30 percent. Now, with more users on machine that number has been
pushed up."
The improvement is, however, hard to quantify. "We're
still trying to get a handle on what might be as it varies a lot
between organisations," Sargeant says. "But even if it's just a 5 to 10
percent improvement, it may stop an organisation from having to buy
another box in six months time."
Server virtualisation is already
very popular in large companies, but its more recent uptake in more
medium-size business is of interest, says Sargeant. "And for customers
looking for hosting [of applications on another company's machines],
providers can offer continuity and easy deployment," he adds.
Managed
hosting provider, Bulletproof Networks is overhauling its business to
go virtual. "We're putting in a completely new server farm for this
project alone," general manager Lorenzo Modesto says. The company's
"six-figure investment" will be well worth the effort explains.
"If
Bulletproof can deploy managed hosting faster that's an obvious
benefit," he says. "At the moment, deployment times for managed
hosting, from end to end, include time for ordering, waiting for the
delivery and configuring the hardware. The delivery alone can account
for 10 to 20 days."
Bulletproof expects a virtualised hosting
model will simplify matters for both its own operations and customers.
"Right now, customers have a box that they rent or buy outright. We
even let customers bring their own, provided it has the relevant
warranty, and we take over managing it – it's the management, not the
box, that's important to us," says.
These rent-a-box days are
numbered. "Customers won't have to worry about hardware becoming dated
almost immediately, like a car depreciates when you put it on the road;
or getting slow as soon as the demands on it increase."
"VM
[Virtual Machine] hosting is going to mean the customer or developer
never has to worry about hardware refresh cycles again. They just buy
server capacity, however much they need."
Bulletproof expects to launch customer pilots in the next quarter.
One
customer, Info Salons, is likely to be one of the first on the new
virtual farm. The company provides a badging service for attendees at
conferences and industry trade shows.
Information Technology
manager George Hirst is looking forward to some additional freedom from
the new hosting environment. "At the moment we're on a shared hosting
service, so if we want to put on other components they have to be
verified, to ensure they don't disrupt the others on the service,"
Hirst says.
"For example, to generate a bar code, we have to use
third party software. Bulletproof had to test it so that it didn't
affect other clients' software on the machine. They had to schedule the
test into their workload and it took about a week."
"That's the sort of component we'd want to put on freely in the future, without having to go through the testing cycle."
Bulletproof
is currently finalising agreements with hardware vendors and will turn
from software to VMware, which largely pioneered virtualisation for the
Intel-based server market. Other server virtualisation products
available include Microsoft's Virtual Server, the open source favourite
XenSource for Linux environments and, for IBM's own range of
processors, the IBM Advance Power Virtualisation product.
Virtualisation
is well established in the mainframe world, says Sargeant. "It's been
around for two or three decades. And with the Unix it has been around
for a number of years," Sargeant says. "In the Windows hosting space it
has only been around for three or four years and really has only gained
traction on the last couple."
The concept has been boosted most
recently by favourable changes in software licencing. Traditionally, if
a single piece of hardware housed several virtual machines, each
instance would need its own licence.
"Microsoft changed its
positions so you can break a machine into multiple virtual machines and
pay for one licence," Sargeant explains. IBM has also adopted similar
changes to its licencing regime and Sargeant expects the more flexible
attitude will catch on with other makers.
"It's not absolutely clear out there in the software space, but it's getting better," he says.
It's
hardly surprising that virtualisation is gaining interest, since few
organisations would knock back the opportunity to squeeze more value
from their hardware."
If there's one notable pitfall, however, it
may be the temptation for a company to bite off more than it can chew –
to create more virtual machines than it can handle.
Managment, according to Sargeant, is quickly becoming an important issue.
"People
are implementing products to break up physical machines into lots of
logical machines. The next challenge is to manage all those machines,"
he says. "You might have had 10 severs and have broken them into 40
machines. You now have to manage those as 40 different machines."
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