What IT pros like best about next-generation technology

Flexibility, costs savings and eco-friendly operations make the list

By Ann Bednarz, Network World
October 20, 2008 12:09 AM ET

Do hundreds of gallons of used vegetable oil belong anywhere near a data center, let alone inside? Phil Nail thinks so.

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Nail is CTO of AISO.Net, whose Romoland, Calif., data center gets 100% of its electricity from solar energy. Now he's considering waste vegetable oil as an alternative to using diesel fuel in the Web hosting company's setup for storing solar-generated power.

"We're never opposed to trying something new," says Nail, who last year eliminated nearly 100 underutilized stand-alone servers in favor of four IBM System x3650 servers, partitioned into dozens of virtual machines using VMware software.

Server virtualization fits right into AISO.Net's environmentally friendly credo. The company increased its average server-utilization level by 50% while achieving a 60% reduction in power and cooling costs through its consolidation project.

For Nail, virtualization technology lives up to the hype. Nevertheless, it isn't always easy for IT executives to find the right technology to help a business stay nimble, cut costs or streamline operations. Read on to learn how Nail and three other IT professionals made big changes in their data centers, and what they like best about their new deployments.

No more vendor lock-in

Vendor lock-in is a common plight for IT storage buyers. Lifestyle Family Fitness, however, found a way out of the shackles. The 56-club fitness chain in St. Petersburg, Fla., set out to resolve a performance bottleneck it traced to its storage network, and wound up upgrading its data center infrastructure in a way that not only took care of the problem but also extended the life of its older storage arrays.

Lifestyle's users were starting to notice that certain core applications, such as membership and employee records, were sluggish. IT staff confirmed the problem by looking at such metrics as the average disk-queue length (which counts how many I/O operations are waiting for the hard disk to become available), recalls Michael Geis, director of IS operations for the chain. "Anything over two is considered a bottleneck, meaning your disks are too slow. We were seeing them into the 60, 80 and 100 range during peak times," he says.

After rolling out IBM's SAN Volume Controller (SVC) last November, queue lengths settled back below two, Geis says. The two-node clustered SVC software fronts EMC Clariion CX300 and IBM System Storage DS4700 disk arrays, along with two IBM Brocade SAN switches. SVC lets Lifestyle combine storage capacity from both vendors' disk systems into a single pool that is manageable as a whole for greater utilization. An onboard cache helps speed I/O performance; SVC acknowledges transactions once they've been committed to its cache but before they're sent to the underlying storage controllers. (Compare Storage Virtualization products.)

A key benefit of virtualizing storage is the ability to retain older gear, rather than doing the forklift replacements typically required of storage upgrades, Geis says. "We didn't have to throw away our old legacy equipment. Even though we'd had it for a few years, it still had a lot of performance value to us," he says. Lifestyle uses the new IBM storage for its most performance-sensitive applications, such as its core databases and mail server, and uses the EMC gear for second- and third-tier storage.