Optimizing Server Resources in Today’s Enterprise

It has ushered in substantial cost savings and helped enterprises manage work and business processes far more efficiently. However, the use of large numbers of servers has created an entirely different set of challenges. Managing and optimizing these systems is paramount.

Today, organizations are searching for ways to consolidate and streamline systems—while reducing overall complexity and costs. In order to optimize IT and business operations, it’s essential to step beyond the flat earth of incremental improvements and develop an effective strategy for logical and geographic server consolidation across an enterprise.

Unfortunately, few companies have created an overall strategy for optimizing a server environment. Many are buried under an array of everyday server problems—including patch management, resource utilization, security, server sprawl and management flexibility.

Building a Better IT Department

Efficient use of resources can help organizations achieve better performance and service levels at a lower cost. A more efficient use of resources delivers a higher return on assets, lower total cost of ownership and a streamlined IT environment that lets staff focus on strategic rather than administrative tasks. An effective consolidation initiative trims systems maintenance and cooling costs, reduces systems license fees, simplifies patching and security, boosts system availability, and improves backups and data recovery.

What makes server consolidation so powerful is that it simplifies the management of heterogeneous hardware and software. When an enterprise uses it effectively—through an open architecture, virtualization strategies and other solutions—it is able to maximize the use of existing resources and steer clear of a highly fragmented IT infrastructure. Ultimately, an organization is able to standardize on fewer applications and operating systems, centralize data management and consolidate applications and operating systems.

Confronting Inefficiency

Navigating today’s IT environment is no simple task. Organizations face a number of issues when attempting to optimize a server environment, including patch management, resource utilization, maintenance costs, server sprawl, interoperability, downtime, site licensing costs, and space and energy costs. Companies also face headaches related to managing and retrieving data. Not surprisingly, at some point, customers, business partners and employees feel the impact. What’s more, the organization may find itself facing lagging in productivity and performance.

Most executives understand that a server infrastructure affects various initiatives within the organization. Among the leading concerns: the desire to deliver consistent service levels; institute disaster recovery provisions; protect internal environments, optimize utilization, more effectively plan application, storage, data reduction and redesign, and achieve a greater level of server standardization. In addition, organizations are increasingly looking to consolidate workloads in a number of areas, including databases, business applications, file and print, email, Web and networking.

Organizations with a suboptimal server infrastructure often find themselves facing severe problems: they must add servers faster than the corresponding growth in business activity; they wind up adding multiple servers for every new application; they experience marked server utilization imbalances; performance and service levels deteriorate; they must run multiple infrastructure servers for the same applications; and the IT department finds itself coping with time-consuming administrative tasks.

On the other hand, successful organizations adopt more flexible deployment strategies that meet the need for reliable, scalable and secure business applications. They focus on more than simply reducing the number of physical servers within an enterprise; they strive to create an environment where all servers are used most efficiently. When an organization maximizes server capacity, numerous benefits follow. Instead of achieving minimal cost savings that result from buying less equipment, the enterprise realizes the enormous benefits that come with a far efficient infrastructure.

Seeking Solutions

Server consolidation is a term that’s used to describe the strategy of moving multiple applications onto a single physical server—thus saving both hardware and ongoing management costs. Server consolidation encompasses four primary goals:

The need for better server utilization. Enterprises that maximize the use of servers for processor power, memory and storage, achieve performance gains in the range of 30 to 70 percent. Ensuring that servers are tuned correctly can help re-distribute processor load and reduce the imbalance that often occurs within today’s complex IT systems. Adding virtualization—the ability to store operating systems and data logically across numerous servers (rather than physically)—can further boost results.

Improving server management. Complex environments lead to enormous demands on staff and equipment. By reducing or eliminating much of the administrative burden that surrounds an IT environment—maintaining operating systems, overseeing applications, backing up data, and more—organizations are able to use hardware and IT staff far more effectively…and strategically. What’s more, they are able to reduce software licenses and cooling costs. In some cases, they are also able to reduce the space needed to house servers and data centers.

Increasing reliability. Improving availability and building better backup systems helps an enterprise reduce risk and improve data delivery. The goal is to reduce system downtime and mitigate financial risks while providing a high service level for customers, business partners and employees. Greater reliability also translates into improved levels of security and protection.

Improving flexibility, scalability and agility. With the right systems in place, an organization can react to changing business conditions more nimbly and decisively. The ability to deploy servers efficiently and create a well-designed IT infrastructure is the foundation for present-day performance and future growth. The result is an ability to access information more quickly and deploy new systems in a more strategic way.

As more and more components of the IT infrastructure—such as storage, servers, and network—become virtualized, the flexibility of the system grows substantially. By enabling business policy to be used as a driver for the systems and resources that are available, you can make the move from flexible systems to truly dynamic systems. To support this infrastructure flexibility with software licensing flexibility, Microsoft took the industry leading step to revamp our Windows Server and Windows Server System application (SQL, Exchange, etc) licenses to make them virtualization compatible. For example,

• Run up to 4 virtual instances of Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition on one licensed physical server or hardware partition
• Windows Server System applications running in a virtual environment are now licensed per virtual processors instead of physical processors
• Starting October 1, 2006, new servers licensed with Windows Server Datacenter Edition (and previous licenses with new version rights) will have license rights to run an unlimited number of virtualized Windows Server instances. By simply licensing the server’s processors with Windows Server Datacenter Edition, customers will be able to run Windows Server Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, Datacenter Edition or a mix of the three editions without having to track the number of virtual machines or pay for additional Windows Server licenses.

Taking Consolidation to the Next Level

Organizations can cut server costs by 30 to 40 percent by putting a thorough strategy in place to maximize the utilization of resources—and thus consolidate their server infrastructure. It’s also possible to reduce risk and improve the use of existing resources through improved systems management, greater interoperability and fewer physical servers. In many instances, an initiative begins by tackling file and print servers, databases, messaging, domain and Web servers and evolves to mixed workloads handled through branch offices and then to multiple workloads across the enterprise.

While an array of events might trigger the need for server consolidation—including application upgrades, end-of-life hardware replacements, merger and acquisitions, high availability applications, and increased scalability demands—the common denominator is a well defined set of benefits: improved TCO, better corporate standards, improved service levels and availability, improved disaster recovery capabilities and enhanced system management.
Microsoft believes the combination of virtualization platform and management capabilities will deliver business agility and dynamic resource utilization with greater levels of efficiency.

To this end, Microsoft is investing in management tools like System Center Virtual Machine Manager (now in beta) to manage virtualized datacenters running either Virtual Server 2005 or Windows Server virtualization. By providing integration with the rest of the System Center family of products, customers now have a unified set of tools for managing the complete infrastructure both physical and virtual environments plus the application stacks on top.

Virtualization also offers benefits in terms of business responsiveness. Currently, when a business owner calls in for a new service that requires a new server to be deployed, it typically takes two weeks to three months to bring that new hardware online. Virtual Machine Manager can bring a new virtual server online in just a few minutes.

Tapping into the Power of Virtualization

Virtualization allows a business to manage servers across a heterogeneous environment far more effectively. Virtualization replaces the traditional approach of removing and adding storage by treating numerous storage devices as a single logical entity. Because the environment does not distinguish among physical media contained within servers, a system administrator can swap devices at any time without reconfiguring the entire infrastructure. The ability to run different operating systems and applications on the same physical server lets organizations consolidate the workload placed on servers. If one virtual system fails another can take over instantly and perform the same tasks.

In conjunction with Windows Server 2003 R2, Virtual Server 2005 R2 provides a virtualization platform that runs most major x86 operating systems in a guest environment, and is supported by Microsoft as a host for Windows Server operating systems and Windows Server System™ applications. Virtual Server 2005 R2’s comprehensive automation interface provides IT administrators complete scripted control of portable, connected virtual machines and enables easy automation of deployment, and ongoing change and configuration.

On the Front Lines of Business

Every organization faces its own set of roadblocks—and must blaze its own path to success when working to manage server resources most efficiently. At one Atlanta-based restaurant chain, the biggest challenge was limited space in its data center. The company has already moved the data center once because of a “one application, one server mentality.” Virtualization and consolidation will allow the company to use resources within the data center more effectively, reduce the number of servers and allocate computing power more efficiently.

Putting a strategy into play creates additional challenges, however. The company faces an additional investment in a storage solution and executives are concerned about “the replacement “of an already significant investment in the separate storage needs of the applications we run,” says an IT executive. Furthermore, the company must cost justify replacing servers that are relatively new and use TCO and ROI analyses to show that the new environment will lead to long term cost savings through reductions in facilities and management costs.

The company’s long-term goal is the development of a consolidated platform that it can quickly and easily adjust to the needs of the business. It will achieve best practice results through the reallocation of resources and efficient utilization of the overall computing environment as well as available physical space.

Other organizations are also taking heed. At a large financial services firm in Canada, executives view server consolidation as a strategic and fundamental requirement. Data center efficiency, asset control and optimization, and total cost of ownership are all key drivers. The company has marched forward with an initiative that has already improved provisioning workflow from 6 weeks to 3 days. Using virtualization, it has boosted the operational effectiveness of assets and driven down operational costs.

Increasingly complex IT environments require increasingly innovative approaches. At a leading food producer based in New York State, rapid growth translates into rapidly changing business and IT requirements. Because the company’s infrastructure can no longer support more servers, the company has identified key strategic and tactical objectives and developed a plan to affect change.

The former includes high availability and faster deployment of new servers. The latter involves using load balancing across a pool of servers and achieving high availability of applications. Over time, the firm has moved outdated Windows 2000 servers to a virtual environment and changed numerous physical servers into the virtual realm as well. The initiative has saved the organization staff time and money while boosting availability for existing hardware.

Conclusion

The complexities associated with today’s distributed IT systems are driving businesses to spend as much as 70 to 80 percent of their IT budget just to maintain what they have. In addition to driving up the costs of operations, the complexity of these systems is at the source of many challenges across the entire IT life cycle. By investing in server consolidation and virtualization solutions at different levels and providing a range of solution options, Microsoft can create a dynamic virtualized infrastructure and make IT a true value generator for your organization.