WSTA Data Center Seminar:
Data Center Virtualization

Yes, virtualization saves money. But a major webhost talks about the issues that the virtualization vendors don't like to discuss.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 28, 2007]

On Tuesday August 7, 2007, I walked down the street from our Manhattan office and attended (as press) a seminar offered by the Wall Street Technology Association (WSTA) called "Next Generation Data Center Challenges and Solutions."

Although the seminar was directed at the CTOs of major financial firms, the issues that these companies face are the issues that ISPs are facing now or will face in the future when they grow. Two speakers represented ISPs (NTT and Level 3), but were scheduled at the same time. We chose to hear Christian Teeft talk about virtualization. Teeft is the director of engineering for the enterprise hosting division of NTT America (most known for the acquisition of Verio many years ago).

Teeft opened by noting that some major websites have gone down recently. Yelp and Craigslist went down due to a power outage. On the other hand, Netflix, which went down at the same time, crashed for other reasons.

Power is important. Teeft put this image of the 2003 blackout on the screen to show the impact of a blackout.

He said that financial companies, which have a global presence, should move from regional disaster recovery plans and go global. Do so, and other benefits follow. For example, a call center can follow the clock around the world.

NTT's hosting division has a home grown OSS that the company feels provides the best of commercially available applications. "It provides BladeLogic-like provisioning and Tivoli-like monitoring," Teeft said.

The challenges of adopting virtualization
While some applications respond well to virtualization, others, especially those requiring real-time transactions do not. Microsoft Exchange is one example of an application that does not respond well to virtualization. Perhaps Netflix's ordering system is another.

Switching from a physical to virtual (P to V) architecture is not simple. "Migrations can fail."

VMWare costs money, whereas virtualization from RedHat and Microsoft (Windows Server 2008) are free. But, Teeft noted, WMWare is supported by Intel, Cisco, and other major players. He added that some financial firms use IBM AIX.

"The issue holding back virtualization is storage," he said. At the moment, it's too expensive. "EMC, IBM, Hitachi, and everyone else all charge too much."

Virtualization benefits
The benefits of virtualization had already been articulated by previous speakers. Virtualization allows data center owners to put more data in the same amount of space. Depending on the application, de-duplication can deliver significant savings.

And for backup, a data block one-tenth the size of the live footprint can, in some cases, be used.

The bottom line: by all means embrace virtualization, but anticipate problems, especially with real-time applications.

—End