Near-total virtualization makes SaaS vendor more flexible

Server virtualization at most IT shops today is done only sparingly, on a few servers here and there. Not at Transplace,  a software and services provider that virtualized about 90% of its servers in just six months last year.

Virtualization can save money and space in the data center, but for Transplace the most compelling benefit was flexibility of IT systems.

"We’re always needing to spin up a demo or test environment for one reason or another. With virtualization, it’s easy, I don’t need to go and find servers,” says Vincent Biddlecombe, chief technology officer of Transplace in Plano, Texas. “It certainly allows us to scale much easier, it allows us to provide servers much faster. It helps tremendously with the ability to support dynamic environments and … truly viable disaster recovery.”

IT departments using virtualization have on average applied the tools to only 24% of servers, though that number is expected to grow to 45% by 2009, according to Forrester Research. Transplace has already doubled 2009’s expected level of virtualization.

Transplace has about 550 employees including 100 in IT, many of whom are busy writing custom software that runs on BEA WebLogic. A year ago, Transplace decided to move its production data center from its corporate headquarters to a co-located facility in Dallas, and figured it would be an ideal time to upgrade servers and storage. 

“The hardware refresh really opened up a lot of doors,” Biddlecombe says, noting that the company – which provides transportation management services and logistics technology through the software-as-a-service model – had no previous experience with virtualization.

Transplace was running Sun systems almost exclusively, but switched to Network Appliance for storage, partly because the vendor offers software that makes it easy to replicate storage from production to a disaster recovery facility, Biddlecombe says.

Then Transplace replaced its Sun database servers with IBM’s System p570 based on POWER6 processors, partly because of p570’s logical portioning system that let Transplace run multiple instances of Oracle’s database software on a single server.

Finally, Transplace decided to switch from Sun to Dell servers at the application layer, with VMware ESX running well over 100 virtual machines.

Transplace planned the upgrades during the first half of 2007 and then implemented them over the year’s final six months. Now the company is focusing on moving disaster recovery from corporate headquarters to another facility Transplace runs in Lowell, Ark. by the end of 2008’s first quarter.

With VMware virtual servers running on centralized storage, Transplace is finding it simple to copy storage over to its disaster recovery center, Biddlecombe says. By project’s end, Transplace will have about 20 Dell servers in its production data center in Dallas and another 20 in the disaster recovery facility, along with two IBM p570 servers in production and one in disaster recovery.

There are certainly challenges to implementing virtualization, Biddlecombe says.

“There are definitely network issues,” he says. “You need more network interface cards, because you’re communicating much more between your central storage and the virtual machines. Your whole operating system, you whole virtual server is now on the virtual storage. There are network infrastructure issues you have to understand and plan for and deal with.”

Biddlecombe wasn’t that impressed by server cost savings. Additional costs for VMware software and extra network infrastructure can double the price of a regular server, he says, but Transplace is definitely saving some money, since Biddlecombe says the company runs seven to 10 virtual servers on each machine.

Transplace is standing pat at 90% virtualization, but Biddlecombe expects to have a fully virtualized server environment by 2009.

“Our rules [today] are we don’t virtualize anything that needs more than 4 CPU cores or is very I/O-intensive,” he says. Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server falls into that category for now, but Biddlecombe predicts “as virtual machines can address more memory, as virtual machines can have more than four cores, I would expect within 18 months we won’t have a single server that’s not virtualized.”