The stock market is tanking. AIG executives are spending almost a half million dollars for a luxury spa retreat right after they got a chunk of change from the $700 billion bailout. Companies around the country are tightening their belts and cutting back on expenditures. All across America, budgets for new IT purchases is getting reevaluated.
So why is this a great time for virtualization projects? Simply because the ROI on virtualizing your datacenter can be less than a year, saving you money on your bottom line THIS budget year! Depending on the size of your datacenter, and your new server refresh cycle, you may be able to repurpose this year's budget to a virtualization project and actually decrease your bottom line.
I know, that sounds almost impossible, but let me show you how it works. Assuming that you have a datacenter that is populated with ... say 50 servers. They can be a mix of Windows, Linux, or other x86-based hosts. Another assumption is that of the 50 servers, you are retaining them 4 years, and replacing them on a regular cycle, at probably 12 new servers per year. After memory, drives, etc, you are looking at probably $5,000 each for a ballpark number of $60k per year for new server purchases.
If you were to virtualize your datacenter with VMware, you should be able to migrate 40 of your existing servers to VMs as part of the project. In an ideal world, we could virtualize them all. However there may be a few servers that require unsupported expansion cards, are being outsourced, or are true ‘high performers' that are not suitable virtualization candidates. A conservative estimate would be that we could support 40 virtual machines within a 3 host ESX infrastructure. It would be very feasible to re-purpose an existing server as your Virtual Center management server. Therefore, rather than purchase 12 new servers for this year, you would only require 3 new servers.
Over the past few years, iSCSI has seen a slow transition from a maverick (thank you Sarah Palin and Tina Fey for keeping this word at the top of my brain) low-cost offering for block level storage into a mainstream solution. The maturity of this offering has met or exceeded all expectations. Dell's purchase of EqualLogic last year was a clear signal that iSCSI is becoming a major player in the storage game. The simple fact that the Dell|EqualLogic line is their fastest growing storage solution, and Dell is putting the full weight of their marketing arm behind the product shows the versatility that iSCSI offers. Being the only major player with a custom iSCSI solution gave Dell a distinct advantage over the competition.
The Dell EqualLogic PS5500E is a high-density virtualized storage array that can deliver a hugely scalable iSCSI SAN. Like the rest of the EqualLogic family, it combines intelligence and automation with fault tolerance to provide simplified administration, rapid deployment, enterprise performance and reliability, and seamless scalability.
