Are You Over Virtualizing Your Technology Infrastructure?

In a recent key note address at Gartner’s 2010 Infrastructure and Operations Summit, Raymond Paquet, Managing VP at Gartner, made the point that consistently over the last eight years 64% of the typical IT budget has been dedicated to tactical operations such as running existing infrastructure. A driving factor behind this consistent trend is the tendency of technology managers to over deliver on infrastructure services to the business. Paquet makes the point that technology managers should always be focused on providing the right balance between technology solution cost and the quality of service the solution provides to the business. As the quality of a technology service increases the cost of that service will naturally increase. There is often still a gap in the quality of service a business requires and what is architected and built by technology professionals. The key is to understand the businesses requirements in terms of parameters such as uptime, scalability and recoverability and to architect an infrastructure aligned with these requirements. Sounds simple, right? Often however technology professionals find themselves (usually inadvertently) swept up in implementing technology solutions that at specific levels of adoption add value to a business but at unnecessary levels of adoption serve to pull budgets and resources away from more value added activities. Virtualization is a case in point.

The gap between quality of technology services required by the business and the cost to deliver them can be observed today in the tenacious drive by many technology managers to virtualize 100% of their IT infrastructure. Gartner research VP Phillip Dawson points out what he calls the “The Rule of Thirds” with respect to virtualizing IT workloads. The theory is that one third of your IT workload will be “easy” to virtualize, another one third will be “moderately difficult” with the remaining third being “difficult” to virtualize. Most technology organizations today have conquered the easy one third and have began working on the moderately difficult workloads. The cost in terms of effort and dollars to virtualize the final one third of your IT workload increases exponentially. Are you really adding value to your business by driving 100% of your environment into your virtualization strategy? The recommendation from Dawson is to first simplify IT workloads as much as possible by driving towards well run x86 architectures. Once simplified, IT workloads with low business value should be evaluated for outsourcing or retirement. Retirement may consist of moving the service the application provides into an existing ERP system thus leveraging existing infrastructure. Workloads with high business value will likely now (after simplification) be cost effective to bring into your virtualization strategy.



So be selective in the applications you target for virtualization. Be sure that all steps have been taken to simplify the respective applications technology infrastructure so that it is not in the upper third of costs and effort in terms of virtualization effort. Outsource or retire complex applications where applicable rather than force fitting them into your own virtualization strategy. Look for ways to retire low business value applications with complex technology architectures (such as moving them into an existing ERP package). The bottom line is that all technology investments and initiatives must be aligned with your organizations needs and risk tolerance. Virtualization is no different. Making unnecessary efforts to virtualize certain applications may be doing more harm than good.

Your Data Center Hosting Provider is Stealing Your Money

Well, stealing is a strong word. What is happening however is that traditional data center hosting providers are getting in the way of thousands of small to medium sized businesses as it relates to realizing the true energy based cost savings associated with virtualization. Virtualization has changed many aspects of the traditional IT infrastructure and fostered innovations in all areas of traditional infrastructure service provision. What has not kept pace is innovation and investment on the part of data center hosting providers in facilities infrastructure geared towards delivering services such as power and cooling in a fashion that is aligned with the new realities of virtualized IT computing loads. This is directly limiting the ability of small to midsized companies who host their IT environment in these data centers to fully realize the total energy savings that virtualization can provide. In the following paragraphs I will provide a summary of APC white Paper 118 which does an excellent job of explaining how the total energy savings from virtualization is dependent on a realignment of data center infrastructure to meet the needs of a reduced and consolidated IT load. I will point out exactly where small to midsized organizations hosting there IT load in traditional hosting providers facilities are leaving money on the table as a result of their hosting providers in-action.

The following diagram demonstrates the primary sources of energy consumption in a data center. The support power represents energy that is lost due to the inefficiency of data center physical infrastructure such as power and cooling systems. This is energy that is consumed in the operation of the equipment itself rather than being transferred to the IT load and being used for useful computing work.



After you virtualize your server environment, your IT load will decrease. This decrease will make the PUE of the data center worse due to inefficiencies caused by a physical infrastructure continuing to operate at what is now over capacity for the new virtualized IT load.



So while a decrease in energy cost due to IT load consolidation and virtualization is certainly positive, it is only a fraction of the overall savings possible. The total energy savings made possible by virtualization can only be achieved if the data center physical infrastructure is re-architected to be more allinged with the new realities of virtualized IT loads.



Specific recommendations for changes to data center physical infrastructure to achieve a closer alignment of physical infrastructure services with virtual IT loads can be found in APC white paper 126.

In all fairness to hosting providers, realizing some of the efficiency gains of re-architecting physical infrastructure is a true challenge in an environment inherently designed to provide shared service across many organizations with unique IT loads, peak demand periods and degrees of virtualization and consolidation. Looking from the point of view of a mid-sized IT organization that has diligently virtualized and reduced IT load requirements only to find themselves “trapped” by existing power circuit contracts or by an inflexible hosting provider who has not invested in physical infrastructure innovation reveals a logical degree of frustration. In any market such as data center hosting where the barrier to entry is high due to large capital expenditure requirements, innovation by market leaders tends to be slow. What is needed is a new type of hosting provider built from the ground up to provide modern, flexible solutions such as “pay by the drink” for power services and individualized cooling solutions through innovations like row based cooling while maintaining independence from the overall environment of the data center.



Should traditional hosting providers fail to make these innovations then no doubt, a new breed of more agile competitors, unburdened by large historical capital investments in dated infrastructure will emerge and force fundamental change in the hosting industry. Mid-sized customers may also find the additional value hosting services provide such as physical security to longer be enough to prevent them from investing in their own facilities where they can innovate themselves and keep all the gains. Virtualization has changed almost everything with respect to IT infrastructure service delivery, it is time for hosting providers to catch up.

Tool for Calculating Computer Room Power Requirements

Have you ever been asked to calculate how much power you will need for a computer room? Maybe you are opening a new field site, standing up a call center or planning for a data center. I have always found it time consuming to chase down the power requirements of the specific gear I plan to install in order to come up with a reasonable estimate. APC offers a great web based tool for estimating critical IT loads. The tool has the power needs of a plethora of commonly used gear. You can build a solution that will give you your overall power needs. The end result is a recommended APC UPS system (of course) but the power requirements are also handy for estimating generator needs etc. The tool is available at

APC Calculation Tool