By Douglas Gourlay
If timing is everything, now is clearly the time to commit more resources to virtualization. By delivering demonstrable ROI, a more agile IT operation, and sustainability benefits, virtualization lets us do the right thing for our businesses and for the environment.
Let me give you an example from here at Cisco. Back in 2002 we considered building a new data center at a cost of roughly $250 million. Given the state of the economy back then—not too dissimilar to the economy today—it would have been nearly impossible to get our board to approve an investment of that size. Fortunately, we had been pioneering virtualization technologies in our labs. So, instead of making a multi-million dollar investment in new data center construction, we stepped up our virtualization initiatives and aggressively moved them from a production to a live environment.
Added capacity from virtualization let us delay construction for several years. If you calculate a new data center's annual expenses—$25 million for power and $15 million just to pay back capital costs—we saved $40 million per year. That's the kind of ROI our management likes to see. That's the kind of ROI that gets CIOs recognized for the right reasons.
Environmentally Sustainable Business Growth
The dollars and cents argument also extends to the environment. We're all in favor of sustainability. But we also have businesses to run, customers to serve, and margin targets to hit. Thanks to virtualization, these two objectives don't have to be mutually incompatible. Think about how our power needs have changed over the last decade. In this always-on, e-business world, we've been driven to deploy new applications and make existing ones more available. Often, we've accomplished this by adding new servers. Some of these servers were only being utilized to about 10-percent capacity—even though we were still paying to power and operate them.
Controlling Power Usage with Virtualization
Now that power is an issue, the main way we can personally impact its rising cost and diminishing supply is to control our demand. Virtualization helps us conserve. The power requirements of the data center grow by about 20 percent per year, and the cost of power is escalating. In a typical data center, about half the power keeps systems cool and about 40 percent provides the juice to keep IT equipment running. The more efficiently we can use power, the more work we can process, the longer our data centers will remain viable—and the lower our power bills will be.
Hidden Benefits of Virtualization
There's yet another benefit to virtualization that gets less attention but pays big dividends: Virtualization helps break down IT silos, enabling collaboration. Quickly partitioning server capacity cuts across organizational boundaries. The server, storage, networking, security, and facilities teams have to work closely together. While virtualization often sparks collaboration, the benefits can be far reaching. Fewer silos doesn't just mean everyone gets along better, it also means added availability, uptime, and performance and sparks innovation between teams.
Silos vs. Collaboration: Real-World Example
Two large firms recently experienced a power outage within days of one another. One firm had moved to a more collaborative IT structure. Processes and teams were unified. Within ten minutes of the outage, they had moved tier-1 applications to a new data center. Business was barely disrupted. The second firm was still doing things the old, siloed way. The networking, application, server, and storage teams each restored their systems independently and incrementally. More than four hours later, service was finally back. As a result of the downtime, the company faced fines and penalties, not to mention missing out on hours worth of revenue.
How Cisco Can Help You
You may be wondering where Cisco fits into all this; after all, we're principally a networking company. As the atomic unit of the data center shifts from the physical machine (traditionally the server) to the virtual machine, the role of the network itself changes. Instead of focusing on ports alone, you now want to map services against the virtualized machine and enable virtual machine mobility while preserving associated services and addressing.That's where Cisco infrastructure, specifically our Catalyst and Nexus product lines, and our data center team come in.
As you start thinking about tapping virtualization's power, consider a few things. There's still plenty of low-hanging fruit to grab. Projects like WAN optimization for server consolidation in branch offices and SAN consolidation for centralizing and maximizing storage are two examples. As you start to move existing virtualization projects into a live environment, you'll reap additional benefits. Remember, there's still a lot of green to gain—for the environment and your business.
Douglas Gourlay is a Sr. Director leading Cisco's Data Center Solutions Group
