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Virtualization:
Consolidation to
Cloud Foundation
With virtualization comes a simple, automated infrastructure
that leads to a dynamic, efficient enterprise.

Over the last several years, virtualiza- end-all for virtualization. The real goal operational issues that stand in the
tion has proven itself an invaluable is an efficient enterprise, one in which way of a full-fledged commitment to
technology for streamlining test and the infrastructure is so simplified and a virtual infrastructure. Many organi-
development environments, consolidat- automated that IT can focus on in- zations are struggling to get past the
ing IT infrastructure, reducing costs and novating for the business rather than 25-30 percent mark for virtual serv-
setting enterprises on the path to cloud keeping the lights on, as it were. ers compared to dedicated hardware,
computing. Finding a company that Mann says. Even organizations with
hasn’t implemented at least one virtual Andi Mann, vice president of research, aggressive consolidation plans have
server would be a daunting assignment systems and storage management for undertaken them mostly with low-
indeed. The numbers are too compel- Boulder, Colo.-based analyst firm Enter- impact applications in mind. Physical
ling to ignore. Take consolidation, for prise Management Associates (EMA), infrastructure remains the preferred
example: experts agree that virtualiza- describes virtualization’s evolution: choice for supporting business-critical
tion provides the ability to consolidate “Test and development came first, then applications.
physical servers by approximately 20:1, consolidation drove explosive growth.
cut capital and operational costs in half, But now virtualization is about flexibil- The reason? “They’re realizing that
and improve resiliency. ity, with the real driver being the ability managing virtual servers is harder than
to provide fast, efficient access to new they thought it would be,” Mann says.
Virtualization End Goal: services and environments.”
The Efficient Enterprise
But as many companies have dis- Yet as critically important a technol-
covered, test and development and ogy as virtualization has become, the
consolidation can’t be the be-all and average organization is grappling with
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The Challenge of Heterogeneous alization challenges are stymieing ESX Server virtualization software.
Virtualization Environments further deployment at many compa-
Virtual infrastructure presents a dis- nies. “Unfortunately, many companies Cost and time savings have been
tinct set of management challenges. that started the virtualization journey significant. At the 5,000 virtual server
Traditional management tools aren’t have run into a lot of roadblocks. mark, for example, Dell’s IT group esti-
as useful for virtual infrastructure as They’ve run into people, process, tools, mated saving $29 million in hardware
some might want to believe, especially technology and performance issues,” purchases, reduced space and power
when dealing with heterogeneous en- he says. “And these have nothing to do costs. “Our analysis shows that every
vironments. Although many companies with consolidation but operations.” nonproduction virtual machine we de-
began their virtualization efforts with ploy saves us about $6,500 compared
VMware’s market-starter hypervisor, This has led to myriad disparate to deploying and running a physical
virtualization is fundamentally hetero- virtualization initiatives at companies. server, and every production virtual
geneous, Mann notes. “Many companies say, ‘Yes, we’ve de- machine saves us about $9,300 over a
ployed virtualization.’ But what they’ve three-year period,” says Matt Brooks,
“Companies are deploying multiple done is deployed it in this business an IT strategist at Dell. What’s more,
hypervisors and multiple virtualiza- unit over here and this one over there. Dell’s IT team can deploy virtual servers
tion technologies—at the operating No one has collectively brought those and new applications to meet internal
system, storage, server, network together,” Dina says. demand approximately 90 percent
and desktop levels—from multiple faster than it could before virtualization.
vendors,” Mann says. In fact, EMA The next phase in the virtualization
research shows that only 2 percent of journey, Dina says, is about coordinat- Dell, one of the top VMware license
organizations have a homogeneous ing, consolidating, grouping and shar- resellers, gears its service execution
virtualization environment. The aver- ing virtual resources so that every- toward the same speed and predict-
age organization has four different body—not just one business unit—can ability it has achieved internally. The
vendors, technologies and platforms in take advantage of a universal virtual- goal is to create limited, fixed-price
its virtual environment, Mann adds. ized infrastructure. “That model,” he engagements that assure operational
says, “requires a change in operations.” readiness and practical executable
This isn’t a tools issue alone. At many plans, Dina says.
companies, virtualization also gives Dell Services: Assessing
rise to personnel problems. “Virtualiza- Readiness and Speeding Cadence Design Systems, a global
tion puts its tentacles into everything, Deployments electronic design company based in
and organizations are finding that they Dell has parlayed its extensive inter- San Jose, Calif., can attest to the effec-
can’t just have a virtualization team nal experience with virtualization into tiveness of Dell’s virtualization guid-
managing the environment,” Mann a services organization that helps ance. Three years into a virtualization
says. “They have to have an entire customers quickly analyze and deploy program that began with data center
management operations team working an effective virtualized infrastructure. consolidation, the company now runs
and knowledgeable in virtualization. … Using a standard virtualization model a flexible, modular architecture that
Once you get to a certain point, virtu- in its data centers worldwide, Dell’s IT provides energy and cost efficiencies
alization is computing, and computing team has built a massive virtual infra- and is easy to grow as needed.
is virtualization, so you really can’t structure that today comprises more
separate them.” than 7,200 virtual machines. The cen- Cadence Design Systems uses a Dell
terpiece of the model is a four-socket solution comprising servers with Intel
Anthony Dina, director of solutions Dell PowerEdge R900 server with Intel Xeon processors and storage blades
marketing at Dell, agrees that virtu- Xeon processors running VMware® to build a modularized architecture
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“Virtualization puts its tentacles into everything, and freeing IT staff to focus on new initia-
tives rather than maintaining a legacy
organizations are finding that they can’t just have a environment. The virtualization project
virtualization team managing the environment. They paid for itself in the first two years,
says Rob Branson, director of the PAC-
have to have an entire management operations team CAR infrastructure technology team.

working and knowledgeable in virtualization.”

Emerson, a St. Louis-based global
— Andi Mann, Enterprise Management Associates technology company, underwent a dra-
matic transformation in its data center
environment when it virtualized on
that’s repeatable, easily deployable and a 26:1 consolidation ratio and avoid Dell™ PowerEdge™ blade servers with
scalable. “The Dell modular strategy more than 2 million kilowatt hours. Intel Xeon processors. The company
enables us to solve our IT challenges by All told, virtualizing and consolidating eliminated 3,600 servers and reduced
giving us tools to help ourselves rather on Intel Xeon processor-based Dell™ 135 data centers down to four. With
than relying on an expensive, long-term PowerEdge™ servers enabled the the changes, Emerson anticipates
consultant engagement,” says Kanishka company to save an estimated $1.3 decreasing the operating cost of its
de Lanerolle, director, virtualization million in capital expenditures. Windows server environment by 15
program, Cadence Design Systems. percent per year. The Dell servers have
“The efficiencies we’ve gained by also helped make Emerson’s global
Since beginning its virtualization consolidating on Dell contribute to the production center 31 percent more ef-
program three years ago, Cadence has company’s bottom line and ultimately ficient than traditional data centers.
implemented more than 1,000 virtual help keep electric rates low for South-
machines on 100 physical servers. Not ern Company customers,” says Dan The Importance of
having to buy 900 physical machines Traynor, IT infrastructure director at Processes and Procedures
has saved the company $2.7 million the company. Following Dell’s processes and proce-
in infrastructure costs, says Kaijun dures (Dell packages procedural guide-
Zhan, IT group director at Cadence. For PACCAR, a $17 billion global manu- lines in operational Runbooks) for iden-
It also saves the company $900 a facturer of premier truck brands based tifying workloads for virtualization and
day—$328,000 annually—in power in Bellevue, Wash., virtualizing on Intel maintaining the environment was criti-
and cooling costs, he adds. “We expect Xeon processor-based Dell™ Power- cal to Cadence’s rapid deployment of
that savings to rise as we continue to Edge™ servers accelerated applica- virtual machines into its infrastructure.
virtualize and consolidate our servers,” tion deployment time from 30 days “Today we have a deployment rate of
Zhan says. to about 20 minutes, enabling quicker approximately 100 virtual machines
response to new service requests. (VMs) per month, which we expect to
Virtualization projects at other Dell Likewise, integrating the virtual server double to 200 VMs per month when
customers are equally compelling. infrastructure with Dell/EMC storage the Dell experts’ work is complete. As
area networks helped speed applica- a result, we’ll be able to complete the
Southern Company, which provides tion recovery time from five hours project much quicker than we could
electricity to more than four million to about 20 minutes, enabling faster have on our own,” Zhan says.
customers in the southeastern United backup and recovery.
States, used virtualization to slash EMA’s Mann agrees it’s important to
server deployment time by a week, In all, the company cut the number of establish strong processes and proce-
drop data center space demands with physical servers by about 50 percent, dures for virtualization. “Some of the
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serious humps to virtualization, and vices you’re offering to your business cloud, if you will, that will shape the
eventually cloud computing, are hu- departments, then you’ll have a [much] way we approach IT services for years
man issues, particularly around politics easier time being agile and responsive to come.”
and skills. The way to get over these and cost-efficient.
humps is to establish standards, con- One of the first lessons Dell hopes to
nect them to policies or translate them “And once you standardize,” he points share, Dina says, is this: Unlike virtu-
to procedures and implement them as out, “you do simplify. And once some- alization, cloud is not a technology
processes,” he says. thing is simplified and standardized, option. It’s a business model. “The
it’s a lot easier to automate.” business model is ‘let’s let end users
The virtualization modular solutions have the keys to the kingdom so they
and Runbook programs follow Dell’s Virtualization as can provision servers at their will on
overarching strategy of helping cus- Cloud Foundation their own expense.’ That’s a cloud
tomers standardize, simplify and auto- Once they’ve done all this, Mann model, and has nothing to do with
mate. As Dell CEO Michael Dell said so adds, many companies may step from technology,” he says.
succinctly during a recent presenta- virtualization into a cloud comput-
tion, “Variation kills.” ing environment where users can tap While it might make great business
into resource pools when, and only as sense for some companies to allow
Not many organizations today have needed. It’s a logical (though unneces- users to buy infrastructure as a ser-
standardized on x86 server infrastruc- sary) step. vice, it won’t make sense for others.
tures, but the economics behooves So a company might ask itself, “‘Do I
them to do so, Dina says. Cadence Design Systems, for one, looks want to be able to provision rapidly
forward to tapping into Dell’s expertise and scale on demand? Do I need a
Dell itself serves as a case in point. on cloud computing as it has with virtu- self-service portal?’ If the answer to
In part by moving 97 percent of its alization. The promise of cloud comput- the latter is no, then cloud isn’t the
systems to Intel Xeon processor-based ing lies in the ability to add lots of flex- right business model. Does that mean
platforms and using only two primary ibility to shared computing resources in being highly dynamic isn’t important?
server images and one global client real time, says Ron Smith, director of IT Not at all—it’s highly valuable. But the
image, Dell already has returned 30 customer enablement at Cadence. decision to move to the cloud is not
percent of its IT budget to strategic one of technology, inevitably, but one
spending and is on track to achieve a Smith credits Dell ProConsult Services of business model,” Dina says.
50/50 ratio in 2010. with helping them develop a flexible,
scalable virtualized infrastructure that “Virtualization is more than likely
EMA’s Mann agrees that enterprises will give the company the computing going to be how enterprises will be
need to weed complexity out of their capacity to deliver innovative software cloud-like,” Dina says. “An efficiently
infrastructures in order to achieve tools and chip designs well into the virtualized and automated environ-
virtualization’s potential in enabling future. “The expertise Dell brought to ment—the most mature virtualization
an efficient enterprise. “The more we the table was extremely valuable,” says environments—will look like clouds.
customize things, the more they’ll Smith. “They helped us find the best What’s so highly valuable is the ability
break and the more effort fixing them way to move forward with virtualization to be dynamic, a mid-step between
will take. If you can standardize your and also to build on that foundation. today’s virtualization and tomorrow’s
server types, your operating systems We’ll be able to build out a cloud that’s cloud options.”
[and] applications, and even lift that specific to us but can meet a variety
up a level and standardize the ser- of business needs—a generic Cadence