SNAP SHOT: DATA CENTER TRANSFORMATION
| Implementing Virtualization to Do More With Less |
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Federal government IT organizations increasingly understand that virtualization technologies bring tremendous value for server consolidation and continuity of operations initiatives, and may even lift future data center investments into the clouds.
That’s because virtualized servers, applications and storage can help reduce data center costs by consolidating the number of physical servers and increasing server utilization from a typical level of 5% to 10%, to as much as 60% to 80%.
According to industry estimates, the primary benefits of data center virtualization technologies include:
1.Reduce downtime – eliminating planned downtime and preventing or reducing unplanned downtime through economical sharing of fault tolerant hardware and automated restart of application servers. Properly implemented, virtualization technologies can enable a dramatic reduction in time to recovery following a disaster.
2.Lower costs – by reducing the need for added hardware and specialized software.
3.Simplifiy processes – by removing the complexity of maintaining an duplicate of the data center’s physical systems for disaster recovery and streamlining much of the recovery process.
4.Broaden protection – IT organizations can increase resource availability and ensure more rapid recovery of critical applications via virtualization.
Networks and Virtualization
Until recently, most data centers were largely considered ‘server-centric.’ However, as the role of networks has grown and almost every computing element has been virtualized, components or pools of virtual resources must be interconnected, leading to the network’s rise as the foundation for future data center development. “Virtualization capabilities such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and virtual private LAN services (VPLS) can help federal IT organizations build extremely fast, high-performance data center backbone networks,” said Tim LeMaster, Juniper Network’s Director of Systems Engineering.
Government data center networks must also offer security, performance acceleration, high density and a resilient network infrastructure, he continued. These critical components help ensure users have the support they need to do their jobs.
Into the Clouds
Increasingly, as virtualization technologies unlock software from clients, servers and storage, this trend has led to enabling advances such as cloud computing, according to Tom Bittman, senior analyst for the Gartner Group, in describing the focus of an upcoming conference on data center strategies.
Cloud computing aims to deliver supercomputing transaction-processing power over the Internet by networking large numbers of servers that use low-cost PC technology, with specialized connections to spread data processing chores across them. In the short term, questions about securing information sent over the Internet, and the ability of suppliers to meet service level agreements (SLAs) remain, and will likely limit the government’s immediate venture into public cloud networks.
One giant step: On Oct. 14, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) infrastructure went live. RACE is a shared services cloud that gives DISA customers on-demand, self-service access to developmental testing resources. RACE is available only within DISA, but customers still get the public cloud experience of a Web portal, 24-hour-a-day availability, a service catalog and a credit card payment option.
One of the biggest challenges public sector IT organizations face as they plan for their data centers is how to incorporate virtualization technologies to best leverage the legacy systems and applications that are necessary and still widely used. Some industry observers claim the growing expense of data center infrastructures will make cloud computing attractive, as agencies could pay a set fee of a few hundred dollars per hour for cloud computing services, rather than investing millions in additional data center construction.