Yeah I said it: “IDS just brought Sexy Back!”
For a refresh a recent customer sought to finally step into the Virtual Limelight. This particular customer, whose vertical is in the medical industry; purchased four Cisco Chassis and eleven B200 blades. Alongside the Cisco server they purchased an EMC VNX 5500 OE Unified Array with two Cisco MDS 9148 FC switches.
Our plan was to migrate over one hundred Virtual Machines onto fifteen physical ESX hosts to the new Cisco/VMware 5.0 environment.
Once we successfully moved the VM’s over we began virtualizing the remaining physical hosts. Now the reality is that not all hosts could be moved so abruptly, thus we are still in the process of converting the hosts. However, by just moving the ESX hosts and ten physical servers our client is already seeing tremendous drops in power usage, server management and data center capacity.
Here is what we started with, otherwise know as the “before sexy”:
A picture is worth a thousand words, so let me just show you exactly what “sexy” looks like in their current data center:
The moral of the story is not to dive head first into centralized storage and virtualization, but to consider what it costs to manage multiple physical servers with applications that under-utilize your hardware. Also good to keep in mind is what is costs to keep those servers operational (power/cooling) and maintained. If you don’t know what these figures look like, or how to bring sexy back into your data center – just ask me, resident Justin Timberlake over here at IDS.
Photo Credit: PinkMoose