E-Book

February 2015

HOW VIRTUALIZATION CHANGES HARDWARE PURCHASES

PURCHASING SERVERS
IN A VIRTUALIZED WORLD
With virtualization taking over networks, storage and servers, the softwaredefined data center is on the rise. This inevitably affects IT buying decisions.
BY CLIVE LONGBOTTOM

Too Good
D

to Be True

Rationalizing
D
Applications

D Moving On to
Purchasing

Persisting Needs
D

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still running physical servers, take a look at the CPU utilization

rates for these machines. At peak,
youre probably maxed out at 100%,
meaning application performance
is suffering. Averaged out over a week or so, however, you
might find that theyre running at less than 10%.
To remedy this waste of resources, IT admins have turned
to virtualization. By taking available resources and making
them accessible as pools usable by multiple applications,
the utilization rates (of servers, storage and networks) are
increased. Subsequently, this increased efficiency can lead
to a halving of required hardware, with the concomitant reduction in energy, licenses, system admins, and other costs
associated with owning all of the equipment.
Virtualization is a great tool, provided it is used correctly.
IT is commoditizing and all that is needed is an estate of
low-cost servers, storage and network switchesor at least
F YOU ARE

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thats the accepted line when the discussion turns to virtualizations effect on purchasing. Not only that, but IT will also
be told that software manages everything else. Applications
needing more resources can just have them applied in real
time via the resource pools; the need for systems engineering is lessened to the point of not being an issue at all.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

In a perfect world, the aforementioned scenario would
occur without a hitch. However, this isnt usually the case.
Virtualization cannot solve every problem. What it does do
is provide flexibility for dealing with the unavoidable issues
that come with an IT platform.
So, what does this mean regarding the purchasing of IT
systems? The cookie-cutter approach may not work for your
IT infrastructure. Basing it on scale-out commodity equipment will only work in certain areas; you will still need good

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systems architects. Also, to support the business, you will

need to understand the interplay between different parts of
the IT platform.
In many cases, the business will need a means of supporting and facilitating a collection of business tasks and
processesit is best to try to avoid thinking of any business
problem in terms of, What business application solves this
issue? Instead, look at which systems are already in place
that can provide support for the underlying business tasks.
This will identify where you do not have the right systems
in place to support the total business process.
This determination constitutes a basic gap analysis. How
do you move from where you are to where you need to be at
a business level, with some idea of what this means at the
technical level?
Once you have completed this analysis, you are in a better position to examine your existing systems and identify
potential upgrades. Do you have multiple instances of a
single application to deal with different departments or
divisions? If so, these should be consolidated into a single
version. If this isnt possible, you should examine why this
is the case. Consolidating application instances can significantly reduce IT overhead costs and increase the usefulness
of the information contained in that application. It can also
help you understand what the base resource load of the
overall application is likely to be and how your organization
may need to shift resources.

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RATIONALIZING APPLICATIONS
Many organizations, when carrying out an application discovery activity, find that they have multiple applications
executing the same overall function. Rationalizing applications to a single vendor can make your negotiating position
much strongermore seats can push your contract over
into a lower cost-per-seat bracket.
Look at all of the applications that you will be retaining.
Are any of them cyclical? For example, if you are running
payroll on-site, then it is likely that this will only be running
once per week or once per month. How about accounts payable? Do you only run those once per month?
Understanding the cyclical nature of certain applications
can really help with regard to virtualization. If the applications can be made counter-cyclical (for example, running
payroll on the last Friday of the month, with accounts payable being run on the second Friday of every month) they
will not be fighting for resources, and can share the same
pool more effectively.
Even more important is determining whether the application is suitable for a scale-out virtualized environment. It
might be better served by running on specialized silicon
maybe on an IBM Power CPU or on Nvidia GPUs. A lowlevel workload could use a low-power Intel Atom processor
or ARM chip. The platformwhatever that may bemust
work in conjunction with the rest of the virtualized environment. You dont want to create siloed hardware islands,

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which present management nightmares and constrain future flexibility.

Once you identify the necessary applications and what
they require as base resources, youll need to look at what
extra functionality is going to be needed to fully support the
business. Whereas historically this may have been based on
buying extra IT hardware and software for support, we now
have far more flexibility.

MOVING ON TO PURCHASING
There will be areas where a pure scale-out modelbased
on using low-cost componentsmakes sense. However, for
many, the scale out is better served through the purchasing
of converged (pre-built) systems. Here, the likes of Cisco,
Nutanix, Dell, IBM and HP provide systems that have a mix
of pre-engineered CPU, storage and network resources that
are fully engineered into a single system. This converged infrastructure means that the interplay between the resource
variables is optimized, and that provisioning of the system
can be carried out in hours rather than days or weeks.
Many of these converged systems allow for the inclusion
of different workload CPU systems through the addition of
blades or bricks into the system. These are based on GPUs
or low-powered CPUs. IBM, through its zEnterprise, offers a combined mainframe/Power capability; through its
Power-based PureFlex systems, Intel-based systems can be

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added (through Lenovo, now that IBM has offloaded its x86
server business).
Converged infrastructure systems will provide some
degree of storage, but many will need additional storage or
storage aimed at specific needs. For example, certain big
data projects are better served through the purchasing of a
dedicated appliancesomething along the lines of a Terradata, IBM PureData or Oracle Big Data Appliance, the latter
of which adds not only storage but also high-speed analytic
intelligence to the platform.
Other storage will change due to the impact of flashbased systems, from vendors such as Pure Storage, Violin
Memory and SolidFire. The incumbents, including EMC,
NetApp and HDS, are responding, and software-defined
storage will continue to gain attention.
At the networking level, virtualization allows for the
bonding of physical links, which eliminates the physical
limitations on available bandwidth. However, managing
bonded physical network interface cards to provide highbandwidth logical links requires high degrees of network
intelligence. Although software-defined networking (SDN)
is aimed at abstracting that need for intelligence away from
the network equipment to a software level running on virtual, commoditized servers, it is far more likely that the
future will remain hybrid. This would be include OpenFlow
software working with intelligent network operating systems such as Ciscos IOS and Junipers JUNOS to ensure

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that east-west data traffic (traversing between different

parts of the virtual network) can be dealt with in an ideal
manner.

PERSISTING NEEDS
You will still be required to monitor, manage and automate the virtual environment. Cloud-based systems, such
as OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, allow for a major
functional step up from basic virtualization. Private clouds
contain the capability to dynamically apply and remove
resources from workloads as required. Workloads can
also be moved around the virtual environment in a private
cloud. Hybrid cloud, which combines internal and external
cloud platforms, allows for peaks in resource requirement
to be met by external pools, enabling the initial architecting
of the platform to be pitched at a high utilization levelthe
entire peak requirement can be paid for on an as-used
basis.
However, these options still require advanced systems
management. Some of this may come from existing systems management tools, such as IBMs Tivoli portfolio, HP
Softwares systems management portfolio or Dell Quests
tools. It is worth looking at what is now coming through as
more mature virtual-/cloud-based management toolsCAs

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Cloud Manager, BMCs Cloud Lifecycle Management or

Virtustreams Advisor/XStream portfolio among others.
Whatever tools are selected, you need to ensure that they
allow you to manage the virtual environment. Also, you
should be able to apply controls around your overall hybrid
IT platform, including public cloud functions.
What you are aiming for is the software-defined IT platformthe software defined data center (SDDC).
So, the increasing use of virtualization does not lead to
a Nirvana of commoditized scale out and low-cost equipment building blocks. Up-front architectural design is
far more important than it was when you only had to deal
with single workloads on physical servers. Optimizing the
platform means looking at a mix of hybrid systemsfrom
CPUs through to storage and overall cloud-based platforms.
Far more advanced tools are needed to apply the required
intelligence to deal with mixed workload needs and highly
dynamic resource pools.
Virtualizations effect on purchasing is profoundit is
not a case of just telling the purchasing department to order more of the same. The modern IT platform remains
just as heterogeneous as it ever has been, if not more. Understanding this will mean that your IT budget will have a
much better chance of being spent on what helps the business, rather than what purports to help IT. n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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CLIVE LONGBOTTOM is the co-founder and service director at

Quocirca and has been an ITC industry analyst for more than 15
years. Trained as a chemical engineer, he worked on anti-cancer
drugs, car catalysts and fuel cells before moving in to IT. He has
worked on many office automation projects, as well as Control of
Substances Hazardous to Health, document management and
knowledge management projects.

How Virtualization Changes Hardware Purchases

is a SearchServerVirtualization.com e-publication.
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COVER PHOTOGRAPH: RAS-SLAVA/FOTOLIA

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