Data Centers: (Virtual) Power to the People

Author: Mark Kornegay

May 2008

Imagine you woke up one morning and were suddenly able to tap into the 90 percent of your brain that most people never use.  Equipped with the ability to learn Icelandic in a day or perform advanced mathematical formulas sans pen and paper, you would hold a considerable advantage over the rest of humankind.  And what if you had the capabilities of tens of thousands of brains?  

Essentially, this is the benefit that data centers provide: the ability to manage the mechanical and electrical load of an entire network efficiently, while keeping the extremities of the data center’s reach – your home PC, for instance – running smoothly.  Without data centers, chances are good your Internet connection would be too slow to manage the simplest of tasks.  

Additionally, the advent of the “greening” of virtually everything we encounter day to day – including corporate data centers - has led to a lot of discussion within the technology industry about maximizing productivity.  In most company IT environments, some computing power goes unused throughout the day.  But within the halls of data centers, new server technology is harnessing potential and creating significant opportunities for IT departments to impact their organizations’ goals and objectives.

At the management level, this increase in computing power is giving rise to a quickly maturing industry around a computing technique called virtualization.  To understand virtualization, one must consider that many computing products are composed of a combination of hardware and software—often in a one-to-one ratio.  The two components work together to perform any number of tasks but may not capitalize on the full computing power of the software or hardware.  Hence, as company networks have grown, servers typically play specific roles in relation to the larger network.  Unused computing power in any one server in the overall network would not be available to serve the needs of an overtaxed server somewhere else in the network.   

At its most basic level, virtualization is the ability to maximize server utilization through the consolidation of physical server hardware.  Since hardware is a significant line item in most IT department budgets, the ability to increase the utilization of hardware often delivers significant cost savings to an organization as it grows.  Reduced hardware requirements also carry the advantage of lower power consumption, which benefits organizations financially and helps to reduce environmental impact while at the same time increasing business agility and improving availability.  In fact, data centers are starting to be recognized for their environmentally friendly approach, including reusing recycled water and conserving trees.  

Increased organizational agility also can extend from adoption of virtualization technologies.  In the past, increased workloads typically required the addition of physical machines, which would need to be ordered, loaded with software upon arrival and then introduced to the company’s network.  Today, virtualization allows IT departments to deploy workloads in a matter of minutes and respond to organizational demands much more quickly.

Virtualization offers a direct benefit to business continuity and disaster recovery efforts by providing increased responsiveness to physical machine failures.  Reliability improvements like virtualization provide organizations increased business security through the availability of applications and the requisite building blocks for a business continuity solution.  If one server goes down, the company or network is not necessarily going to crash. 

Also being introduced to the marketplace are centralized systems that allow IT teams to manage virtual machines, data centers and labs across the organization with a single, unified tool. The approach drastically reduces the cost and effort of administration, while improving utilization and measurement. Centralized system management can reduce the time to minutes, instead of hours or days, to create and manage virtual machines.

With less than five percent of servers currently using virtualization technology, software developers and manufacturers have significant room for growth by helping customers reduce costs, making IT more flexible and enabling vendors to offer more services.  Combining licensed investments in products, solutions and services that reach beyond just server virtualization and leverage company assets in the employee desktop to the data center will serve to maximize an organization’s investment in virtualization.  

About the author:  
Mark Kornegay is the general manager for Microsoft’s Heartland Area.  He works with customers and partners in a four-state area composed of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.  For more information, please visit www.microsoft.com/midsizebusiness.