Q&A: Christopher Crowhurst discusses Thomson Reuters' massive virtualization initiative

Financial information provider Thompson Reuters is massive on any IT scale. The company, which employees 50,000 people in 91 countries, has 20,000 servers and has been growing its 6.5 petabytes of data storage capacity 40% to 50% annually and its data center power consumption by 20% a year.

The company was looking at building a new data center every two and a half years to keep up with growth. Its data centers in Egan, Minn. are using 7.5 megawatts of power annually, so much electricity that the city of Egan was asking Thomson Reuters to pay them to upgrade the electrical supply grid.

Christopher Crowhurst, Thomson Reuters's vice president and chief architect of Architecture & Business Systems Infrastructure, said the company came up with a plan to double data storage utilization from 30% now to 60% by using virtualization and thin provisioning technology from NetApp Inc., and to use the capital expenditure savings from that project to fund a server virtualization project using VMware aimed at transitioning roughly one-third, or 7,500, of the company's servers to virtual machines.

Crowhurst spoke to Computerworld about the project. The following are excerpts from that interview.

Over time, how much growth in your data centers have you experienced? Over the past five years, we've had 780% growth in storage, 450% growth in servers and 350% growth in power consumption. We're trying to bring down the power consumption growth rate to an annual rate of 13%.

How are you going to do that? When you do all this consolidation work, in effect you're recovering megawatts through the virtualization of existing assets. Then, over the next 2 years, we'll also be avoiding a megawatt of power growth through virtualization of growth assets [future server purchases]. The net effect of this project is that within 30 to 36 months, we will have saved a year's worth of growth.

How far along are you on the virtualization project? The conversion of physical servers to virtual is due to run until the end of next year. We're currently running at 140% of plan, so we're going to complete early. We're going to keep the project going, though. Because the project is funded by the storage optimization, as long as we're recovering capital from that, we can continue to virtualize our server environment. The reality is that the project will never end because the growth side of our technology platforms will continue to drive virtualization. I think what we'll eventually start doing is extend this into a private cloud and move to do some self-provisioning for our business units as we get more confident with the management tools in these virtual environments.

How many servers have you transitioned to VMs so far? About 2,500 servers. But there's also another part of our virtualization strategy that ends up in a target goal of 7,500 servers by the end of next year.

You said you have 6.5 petabytes of storage, about one-third of that is tape. How man storage area networks [SANs] do you have? We have two logical shared SANs and we have several dedicated SANs to specific environments, such as one environment that has to be compliant with HIPPA for health care information, and another for public records databases that have to be segregated for privacy reasons. So there are a wealth of different SANs.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.