Recession proof your enterprise with Linux-based virtualisation

By David M Williams
Sunday, 23 November 2008 16:43

Opinion and Analysis

Businesses everywhere are looking to cut costs in the grip of reduced consumer spending, decreased advertising and a general slowdown of trade. Linux can aid you in cutting your infrastructure costs - no matter your platform of choice.

If your company is like mine you have a data centre somewhere; ours 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 we pump lots of cash into this. As important as technology is, IT departments worldwide are cognoscente of the fact they do not typically generate revenue for the business.

IT costs money, 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.

However, 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.

This is even more pertinent 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.

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.

If you could reduce the headcount of these servers instead of people – but without losing any of the functions these servers do – you would save money and save people, but without your end users even knowing anything was different because all would work just as normal. (Of course, some might say it’s pretty usual for end users not to notice what the IT team do!)

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, Linux-based virtualisation.

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