TAG | Recession proof Microsoft with Hyper-V based virtualisation |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Monday, 24 November 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3 Now, if you’re one of those Linux loving types, David article is perfect for you. It could save you a lot of money, but it threatens to send Microsoft and others broke! If that happens – Linux lovers, advocates and even zealots wouldn’t have anyone to rail against, and we can’t have that, now can we! After all, if you have or work for a company like David’s, you have a data centre somewhere. David’s is in a co-location facility managed by Global Switch with 100mbps Internet and 30mbps WAN connections, redundant power supplies, air conditioning, racks of servers, storage arrays and automated tape loaders. It’s a technical marvel but his company pumps lots of cash into it, and whether it’s for commercial software, for hardware, for bandwidth or for support contracts on commercial or free software, it pumps a lot of money into the economy, and keeps companies that supply hardware and software (even open source software) alive. And, as important as technology is, IT departments worldwide are cognoscente of the fact they do not typically generate revenue for the business, but instead generate money for the IT industry. IT costs money, and as David says, let’s be sensible about that. E-mail, web sites, network connections and the like should all be considered part of the indispensable cost of doing business just as much as telephones, faxes, desks, photocopiers and business cards. As David says, “IT can do more than just provide the fundamentals. A good IT department will seek out ways to improve the business processes and reduce costs via smart use of technology, without loss of functionality” – but this is the kind of thinking that will send Microsoft broke, and robs them of the money they need to create Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 9. David then goes on to warn that “in today’s economy where companies are typically looking at where the budget can be tightened without resorting to reducing headcount – or in less palatable terms, firing people”. But what about all those poor Microsoft staff who face the sack if you don’t buy their products? Don’t these Linux lovers care about anyone but themselves? After all, in an environment where a company has a myriad of servers it’s important to remember every one of those servers is consuming electricity and cooling, has a hardware support contract associated with it, and is occupying rental space. Before ditching your software that already works nicely, you should consider buying new eco-friendly, low power hardware – thus stimulating hardware makers, before changing your entire infrastructure to Linux. You see, if you reduce the headcount of these servers instead of people – but without losing any of the functions these servers do – you would cost Microsoft money and save it from firing people, without Microsoft, Oracle and other companies employees’ even knowing anything was different because life and the pay cheque (for them) would just continue as normal. The first thought that might come to mind is to double up the workload of some of these servers. Why dedicate so many machines to just one or two apps when they have the grunt to run more? It must be understood not all software will cooperate nicely. Perhaps you could consolidate a dedicated SQL Server and a dedicated SharePoint Server to the one machine and free a server that way. Yet, it’s not always going to be this simple. Maybe you run Exchange 2007 but also have a legacy Windows NT 4.0 application to maintain. You can’t join these two together; the legacy app won’t run on a modern version of Windows Server and you sure wouldn’t put Exchange 2007 on NT 4.0. Not to worry: this problem is one that is solved by virtualisation, and in particular, Hyper-V, VMware or Citrix based virtualisation. Or, if you want to put people at those companies out of work, then Linux based virtualisation. CONTINUED |
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