The dollars and cents of server virtualization

From $5,000 in storage-area network software to $250,000 in server hardware, early users talk up virtualization's big savings.

Quantifying the benefits of moving to a virtualized server environment can be really easy, especially if you focus on hardware and software savings, early adopters say.

For example, Tom Taylor, a client/server infrastructure analyst at Baptist Healthcare System, points to the costs he avoided by not having to deploy more of the HP ProLiant 580 servers he typically uses at the Louisville, Ky., healthcare group. "They're quad servers running 32GB of RAM, full of [network interface cards], dual [power supplies], the whole shooting match. And by the time you add the software expenses and the agents, you're looking at a $100,000 investment for just one server," he says. "I conservatively estimated that just by using virtualization in test and development alone, which is the tip of the iceberg here, I was able to provide resources to our people that would have cost us $250,000 without virtualization."

Taylor also says he uses server virtualization with his HP StorageWorks EVA arrays to gain SAN software savings. "If you want to hang a Windows machine off of it, and you want to do multipathing, you have to buy SecurePath, which costs an extra $5,000. But if the Windows server is virtual, [VMware's] ESX does not require SecurePath - it's got built-in multipathing. So you get SAN access cheaper than if you attached a server directly," he says.

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Quantifying the benefits of moving to a virtualized server environment can be really easy, especially if you focus on hardware and software savings, early adopters say.

For example, Tom Taylor, a client/server infrastructure analyst at Baptist Healthcare System, points to the costs he avoided by not having to deploy more of the HP ProLiant 580 servers he typically uses at the Louisville, Ky., healthcare group. "They're quad servers running 32GB of RAM, full of [network interface cards], dual [power supplies], the whole shooting match. And by the time you add the software expenses and the agents, you're looking at a $100,000 investment for just one server," he says. "I conservatively estimated that just by using virtualization in test and development alone, which is the tip of the iceberg here, I was able to provide resources to our people that would have cost us $250,000 without virtualization."

Taylor also says he uses server virtualization with his HP StorageWorks EVA arrays to gain SAN software savings. "If you want to hang a Windows machine off of it, and you want to do multipathing, you have to buy SecurePath, which costs an extra $5,000. But if the Windows server is virtual, [VMware's] ESX does not require SecurePath - it's got built-in multipathing. So you get SAN access cheaper than if you attached a server directly," he says.

Server virtualization helped the city of Charlotte, N.C., avoid huge payouts in data center upgrades, says Philip Borneman, the city's assistant IT director. "We didn't have to upgrade our air-conditioning system, which would have been about a $60,000 capital purchase. We also didn't have to upgrade our UPS, because of the power savings, which would have been a $40,000 capital purchase. So right off the bat, we saved $100,000 by staying within our envelope," he says. The city also saves $5,000 to $13,000 per year on power. All that came with an investment of $13,000 to $16,000 for each Sun SunFire server supporting his environment. "I was able to retire 23 servers and reduce my overhead and maintenance costs all at the same time. That's easy to justify," he adds.

Mark Shackelford, IS director at Baldor Electric in Fort Smith, Ark., says he found virtualizing his firm's 45 SAP servers onto one IBM zSeries mainframe helped IT reduce its overall (expenditures against revenue) from 1.7% to 1% of sales. Virtualizing improved the return on asset (because performance improved 40% and CPU utilization increased to 80%, up from 15% on the individual servers), and it also saved on the bottom line.

"We went from a 6,000-square-foot computer room to just 900 square feet now, with just one data center and one machine," he says. He also says virtualization has helped cut disaster-recovery expenses in half. "About 10 years ago, when we tested our disaster-recovery plan and tried to bring up 50 different machines and functions, we never got through it. Now, in 12 hours, we can get everything back up and running. That's a huge disaster-recovery savings as far as subscribing to a SunGard or IBM or whatever. We didn't even think about that upfront."