UtilityComputing
Utility computing
I seem to have become the local champion of utility computing. From the point of view of a traditional IT department, grounded in the mainframe era (and indeed there is still an ICL VME mainframe in the server room), centralising computing resources makes a lot of sense. And of course the VME guys go "virtual machines? No problem! We understand this."
Why virtual systems? Well, the idea is to try and free ourselves from a dependency on specific machines. Right now, we've got racks full of Dell servers, bought at various times over a period of 5 years or so. Each server runs one application, because a lot of vendors won't support their application unless they are the only thing on the box. This means that each server has a different configuration depending on when it was built, what Microsoft weirdness was in fashion at the time, and what the person who built it threw into the mix to get the damn thing working. This means that every server is different and if a server crashes, we're shafted as far as business continuity goes.
Virtual systems means that we're running on an abstract machine that doesn't care what the underlying hardware is. It also means that we can (in theory) run up a new virtual machine in a couple of hours instead of ordering a new one with a 4-week lead time. Since many of these application have a couple of users, tick over once a day and use a few megabytes of disk, ordering a new Dell with twin Xeons, 1Gb of RAM and 250Gb of disk is a bit of a waste. But for some reason or rather we can't order the 64Mb Pentiums that are all the users actually need. Virtual machines would let them share a state-of-the-art box while remaining oblivious to the fact that another application is running on the VM next door.
So far, the local utility computing strategy has three main threads. These are user interface, storage and processing.
User interface
Basically, we're going down the Citrix route for desktops. Any IT operations department wants to be able to control user systems (at the moment we can't even back up email archives because the users have them on their PCs). We've looked at remote management tools, things like Landesk, and even invested in some of them. There's no denying though that Citrix gives you all the benefits of centralised management, and you get to use it from home, over the internet or whatever.
Citrix lets IT control everything it wants to control and the users get to forget about stuff they don't want to worry about. Of course, it's not so nice for the power users who want to store 100 gigs of MP3s on their work PC, but at least this way we won't get sued.
Storage
Storage Area Networks are the answer to the backup guy's prayers. Right now, our backup runs over the LAN and takes just under 48 hours. It's not the size of it (it's still less than a terabyte), it's the sheer complexity of building the backup images over the network. If it took any longer, we'd be running into business hours and things would rapidly get very nasty. We had two options, put in a special gigabyte backup LAN, or go for the SAN and backup over fibre directly to the tape drive. In the long run, the SAN wins out hands down.
In the past, and in my previous experience, SANs were a real pain to configure and usually required expensive consultants just to get the thing running. But the world has moved on and all the systems we looked at made some concessions to the fact that, what you really want is for the helpdesk to allocate your terabytes away. Of course, they do have to be warned not to allocate the entire SAN to someone's warez collection, but that's why you have ITIL procedures built into the helpdesk software.
We went a bit further than just the SAN software though. We're looking at storage virtualisation software from Falconstor. Even Network Computing had to admit in a recent review that maybe there was something to storage virtualisation these days. At long last, you can forget about LUNs and partitions. You can't quite treat every single disk in the server room as just part of your total storage pool, but you can get damn close. All we need now is to persuade someone to pay for it.
Processing
As far as virtual machines are concerned, there's not really much alternative to VMWare. Well, not until Microsoft gets Virtual Server out the door sometime later this year. And I'm not going to trust the servers to it until it's been around a while. VMWare, on the other hand, has been around the block. It's pretty stable, runs just about anything on Intel, and it's owned by IBM. Our evaluation system is going in any day now and we're hoping to run the test and development platforms for some major systems on it - with the intention of eventually running those major systems under VMWare too.
Right now, whenever we go out to procure a new system, we ask "can it be SAN-enabled?", "does it run under Citrix?" and "does it work under VMWare?" Much to our surprise, quite a lot of people answer "yes" to all three. That's partly because a lot of companies use VMWare for development and for demos. And they use Citrix for home working and support. And, well, most applications can't tell they're running on a SAN unless they're doing some very low-level tricks, which, quite frankly, I wouldn't want to let on any of our systems.