Virtualisation is a growing trend in university data centres. The catalyst that propelled the University of New Hampshire (UNH) to move towards virtualisation was the recognised ageing of our hardware and software environment and an accelerating demand for services. As researchers compile huge datasets and teaching faculty develop multimedia teaching materials, we are seeing exponential growth in demand. The University is taking advantage of virtualisation to reduce costs while increasing agility and efficiency.
The University’s enterprise computing environment supports virtualised servers, centralised storage and a virtual tape library with deduplication capabilities. Because the virtualisation of servers allows for multiple applications running on a single server, we are seeing a decrease in the number of physical servers, a savings in projected server administration costs, reduced power and cooling expenses, and better data centre space utilisation. The servers are now being utilised more efficiently, and through clustering of servers, additional resources can be easily and quickly reallocated for load balancing and failover. New environments can be quickly deployed as well for testing patches, upgrades or critical security updates.
Savings in storage and storage management costs are also being realised through the use of centralised storage. Server attached storage was utilised only by the applications residing on the server. This practice resulted in high levels of unused, stranded storage. In fact, a study by GlassHouse of our storage environment found only 45% of total storage capacity utilised, even as key applications such as MS Exchange were experiencing service degradation. With virtualised storage on a Storage Area Network (SAN), many applications have access to the same storage pool and storage utilisation can be increased. UNH has found that storage virtualisation allows for easy and flexible deployment and sharing of storage. An additional benefit is that less performance management is needed as they use many spindles when creating a virtual disk. Through the efficiencies of this approach we have been able to more than triple storage capacity without increased staffing.
Virtual tape libraries (VTL) and deduplication are also hot technologies these days and are starting to be deployed at UNH. Through the use of the VTL technology, the University is increasing the performance of backup and recovery operations by utilising disk storage as tape. Deduplication is eliminating the storage of duplicate data to make more efficient use of disk space. This will allow for longer retention periods where needed and faster recovery times, while reducing the need for tape backups.
Virtualisation of servers, storage and backups allow the University to achieve its goals of higher availability, better performance, quick scalability and rapid deployment while reducing costs and furthering its commitment to an environmentally friendly data centre.
