IT consolidation with virtualisation pays big dividends

by Nick Van Der Zweep, Director of Virtualisation and Utility Computing and Steve Fink, Director of IT Consolidation

Whether the economy shrinks or expands, one thing is clear: change is a constant, and to survive, companies must continually reinvent themselves. IT managers, challenged to cut costs and improve performance, must think strategically. What infrastructure best serves the future? How can IT be an enabler, not an inhibitor, of change?

In the typical enterprise, a time gap exists between business decisions and IT reaction. The booming 90s left many companies with IT silos, each supporting a different business process—by nature inefficient, inflexible, and hard to manage horizontally. For many, the remedy is IT consolidation, a proven way to centralise IT management, rationalise technology, standardise on fewer applications, reduce risk, and lower costs.

The return on investment (ROI) of a consolidation project is often fast and impressive. But consolidation alone does not achieve agility, and when business changes, re-consolidation must often follow. Virtualisation is what changes the dynamics.

Virtualisation of IT resources is the key to an economical, sustaining platform that enables business agility. It is an essential step toward an Adaptive Enterprise, HP’s vision of an organization where business and IT are synchronised to capitalise on change.

What is virtualisation?
Virtualisation is an approach to IT that pools and shares resources so utilisation is optimised and supply automatically meets demand. The case for virtualisation is compelling: industry analysts estimate that the average utilisation rate of IT datacenters resources is 15-20 percent. With virtualisation, IT resources dynamically and automatically flow toward business demand, driving up utilisation rates and aligning IT closely with business needs.

Pooling and sharing are at the heart of virtualisation. The logical functions of server, storage, network, and software resources are separated from their physical constraints to create pooled resources. Business processes can share the same physical infrastructure. As a result, resources linked with one function, such as ERP, can be dynamically allocated to another, such as CRM, to handle peaks of demand. IT services can also be provided as a utility, on a pay-per-use basis.

Virtualisation is more than the implementation of technology. It’s a new way of thinking about the IT infrastructure. To manage the environment as a whole, IT processes must be standardised and people educated on how to deliver service levels across a shared infrastructure. HP’s robust portfolio of virtualisation solutions and services makes this transformation possible.

Where do you start?
Virtualisation delivers the greatest return when IT resources have first been consolidated and standardised. HP’s IT consolidation journey has many points of entry. Each stage brings greater benefits, from physical collocation, to hardware and data integration, to application integration, to the complete IT utility. Virtualisation has been integrated into every stage. It can be applied at the level of individual devices, applications, or the entire enterprise.

HP can guide you through a phased approach to assessing your environment and identifying the best targets for IT consolidation and virtualisation. Our services address people and processes as well as technology. For some organisations, outsourcing part or all of IT management to HP is the surest way to transform IT. Others collaborate with HP’s expert consultants at each stage to lower costs, reduce risk and drive agility. Whatever your strategy, HP can help you develop a strong business case for your organisation.

Together, IT consolidation and virtualization build the foundation for the Adaptive Enterprise. A simple “before and after” comparison highlights the benefits:

Moving toward the Adaptive Enterprise

Let’s look at how HP helped three very different customers apply consolidation and virtualization to reduce costs and increase agility.

Belkin: strategic consolidation pays off
Belkin Corporation made dramatic gains by consolidating its data center and creating a virtualized, IT utility environment that enables business change.

A manufacturer of home and enterprise connectivity products, Belkin turned to HP to build and support an infrastructure that could sustain the company’s explosive 35 percent annual growth. Belkin was burdened with multiple silos of computing, outdated Sun Solaris servers, and multiple instances of Oracle®. HP proposed replacing eleven Sun data center servers with an HP Superdome server and virtualizing the infrastructure with HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE), which intelligently grows and shrinks server capacity to meet service-level objectives.

Using a third of the floor space and a tenth of the power, the new data center has improved performance by 250 percent, lowered cost of ownership, and resulted in $140,000 annual savings in management software alone. HP VSE deployed on the Superdome automatically shifts IT resources from one application to another to meet peaks and valleys of business demand. With HP Instant Capacity, Belkin can access up to 64 processors but pays for only what it uses. The company is well-positioned for future growth.

Perry Ellis: using virtualization for growth

Perry Ellis knows that maintaining strong brands is key to long-term success. It strategically selects companies for acquisition to permit greater control of its brands’ major product categories and to more effectively rationalize distribution channels for its sub-brands. With the intended acquisition of an equally-sized organisation, Perry wanted to make some changes in its infrastructure to better handle the new expansion. It was clear that its legacy UNIX® server and fiber channel storage array could not handle the increased load.

The company chose an HP virtualisation solution offering greater performance, simplicity and scalability— HP ProLiant Intel-based servers clustered, and HP StorageWorks Virtual Array 7410 storage (which constantly monitors itself and makes intelligent decisions about where to place data so that storage is automatically optimised).

Perry Ellis’ enterprise resource planning, financials, and product development applications had relied on multiple instances of Oracle databases. In the new environment, they were able to consolidate the databases and experience a dramatic improvement in performance while reducing costs as well.

Pittsburgh Public Schools: no limitations

In its mission to raise academic achievement, Pittsburgh Public Schools aimed to integrate technology into the lives of 35,000 students. In its vision, technology would be as familiar as a paper and pencil, and students would have access to any application from any desktop, anytime.

With partner TriLogic Corporation, HP Services consulting and support professionals met the challenge with an open, virtualised computing platform with 165 HP ProLiant Blade and rack mount servers and HP StorageWorks products in a high-performance, high-availability disaster tolerant configuration.

Today Pittsburgh Public Schools has a flexible infrastructure that has no physical, virtual, or logical limitations. They can dynamically allocate IT resources to any application as needed—to academics on weekdays, and human resources and payroll on weekends. With the ability to re-provision Microsoft® Windows® to Linux® servers and run diverse applications, the district is ready for whatever technology dominates education in the future.

Simplicity, agility, value

By creating a standardised, shared IT environment, IT consolidation and virtualisation are vital steps in building an Adaptive Enterprise. HP helps you get there in your own way, at your own pace. Our underlying architecture is open and standards-based, and our approach is collaborative, not prescriptive. Reduced costs, increased agility, and the ability to capitalize on change are the rewards for you and your organisation.

Oracle® is a registered US trademark of Oracle Corporation, Redwood City, California.

Unix® is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

Microsoft® and Windows® are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.