With its eight-year-old data center hardware reaching end-of-life and failing regularly, Malaysia-based ING Insurance wanted a new architecture with strong, dependable availability and scalability.
By adopting server virtualization, Patrick Wong, assistant vice president, head–service delivery group, ING Insurance, not only replaced the aging and inadequate servers, but has managed to save about RM300,000 (US$94,000) in hardware costs, because virtualization meant that he needed to buy less servers.
“Instead of buying 16 physical servers to replace our old desktop servers, we just bought four and virtualized them,” says Wong. In Malaysia, ING Insurance provides life insurance, general insurance and employee benefits to more than 1.5 million customers.
Cost savings is one of the most obvious benefits from virtualization. “So instead of using 50 servers, you can often use fewer servers to do the same thing. And what this does is it immediately reduces your demand for power. And the cost of power across the world is going up,” comments Andrew Milroy, ICT research director (Australia and New Zealand), Frost & Sullivan.
There is also the backdrop of increasing volumes of IT data. “There is a lot more data floating around now so the demand for processing technology is going up as well,” adds Milroy.
“Another benefit is the ease of management; it becomes easier to manage your resources as well, so it can reduce the total cost of ownership,” says Milroy.
According to research from Gartner, the total number of virtual machines deployed worldwide is expected to increase from 540,000 at the end of 2006, to more than 4 million by 2009.
“Several things will make virtualization critical to most enterprises in the next few years: the need to consolidate space, power, installation and integration, and providing server resources which are capable of responding to unpredictable workloads,” says Gartner vice president and analyst, Thomas Bittman.
The old setup that ING Insurance had was simply unable to handle the firm’s systems. “We just had a desktop running our proxy server and antivirus software,” says Wong.
Desktops were used as application servers, because it was thought that the usage for them would be low. “Over the years, a lot of people adopted the applications. Then things began to break down because, you know, PCs are not meant for this kind of work, so at the end we have 20 to 30 of them all in all. Can you imagine running on a Pentium 2 with a 128 to 256 MB worth of RAM?” says Wong. In fact, the desktops took turns to break down. “Maybe at a rate of one per month,” he says, “and we have at least 16 running critical applications.”
Looking back, Wong felt that the implementation of the previous systems was done at a time when “people don’t think about SLA, don’t think about high availability.”
The turning point came when a desktop failed and it took Wong’s team a full day to restore application availability to its 100 users. He then had to act.
Wong and his team wanted to migrate the PCs to actual servers but felt that it was not feasible as the desktops were running lower end resources like proxy servers and anti virus servers. “You don’t need a high end server to replace one to one. That’s why we looked at virtualization.
Addition by subtraction
ING Insurance renewed its hardware in early 2007 with a virtualized environment featuring four physical servers running 16 virtual machines.
The new framework, based on VMware technologies, provides business applications and infrastructure services to about 1,200 users. Tools running in virtual machines include the organization’s leave application systems, proxy and anti virus servers, loans systems, debtors’ and creditors’ systems and investment systems.
“We wanted a more robust architecture so we looked at high availability as one of them, scalability, stability and so the performance is there,” said Wong.
During the proof of concept stage, Wong was impressed by what he saw. “During the proof of concept, we got in two physical HP blade servers. We loaded them in four virtual machines (VMs) just to see whether it runs well on the infrastructure and found that it was quite stable,” he says.
“Later on, by adding on another two physical servers, we actually virtualized around eight VMs. So now we have gone up to 16 VM. So the scalability is there. We just need to add in additional RAM or put in more hard disk space, then we can put in more VMs.”
World in VMotion
With the new infrastructure, life for the IT teams has become easier. Previously, setting up the applications servers entailed three to five working days, with installation of new drivers and patching to the latest versions. Now, Wong estimates the total time taken for loading up the VMs would be less than a day.
“With different hardware and different models, you can not just create the image and just dump it in. Now you can create the image, pack it in and dump it in as and when you want it,” says Wong.
The new virtualized environment has also given Wong’s high availability. Every month Wong’s team would shut down its servers to conduct patching. A component called VMotion enables the team to move an entire running VM instantaneously from one server to another.
The live migrations are mostly undetectable to the user, “one actually does not feel the downtime but there will be a slight slowdown in the system”, and enable the team to carry out maintenance with zero downtime.
“Because we have four physical servers and the other three will take the load so we just need to replace the necessary systems and everything goes back within a few hours,” says Wong.
Beyond saving costs
The benefits of virtualization are not limited to saving server costs and reducing energy spending. Australian mining and civil construction firm Macmahon enabled more than 1500 users to be fully mobile through a combination of desktop and server virtualization. The setup from Citrix enables users to access applications remotely from a central server using thin clients.
“Historically users have had to acquire physical servers for an application, install the operating system and necessary management tools. All this takes time,” says Phil Sargent, managing vice president & team manager, technology & service provider storage research, Gartner.
With virtualization, the deployment time taken by applications has been drastically reduced, he says. This helps provide a competitive advantage for companies when they can get new applications up and running quickly.
One of the biggest benefits for his users, according to Macmahon’s CIO Jason Cowie, is that they can quickly start up and easily work anywhere. “When users go on site they can immediately save maybe one to two hours by not having to wait for IT to reconfigure their computer. They don’t have to wait for their data to be transferred,” he says. The new system also means people do not have to come back to a stockpile of work and e-mail at the office.
Remote offices
Macmahon’s business takes its employees to very inaccessible locations. Their work includes providing services such as management of mines and infrastructure projects like roads, bridges and dams, across more than 50 locations and offices spanning Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia.
The complaint from the users was that IT was unable to properly support their work as they move thousands of miles around the region, hindering their productivity.
“Because we’re a contractor, we move from site to site at the management and working levels. The issues that we had, from an IT viewpoint, were that our people just couldn’t be truly mobile,” says Cowie. Equipment like notebooks and servers needed to be reconfigured at each new location, costing the workers downtime and inactivity.
The initial launch of the project in July last year saw applications such as e-mail and Internet browser available to users on their virtual desktops. Other features include network security, application management and single-sign-on functions. Cowie is also looking to include tools like graphics CAD and 3D modelling for the users.
A simpler life
Cowie’s team managed to cut down the time taken to set up IT infrastructure at the remote work sites, to just a day. Previously, the IT division had to purchase a server, configure and run tests, all taking up to a month.
The department has now eliminated the need for a server, only needing to set up a client terminal and router. “We do not have to configure hardware like PCs, laptops and servers. All we’ve got to do is maintain the virtual environment,” adds Cowie.
With virtual desktop, it meant having fewer items for Cowie’s engineers to diagnose. “If a user is unable to log on, it’s a hardware fault. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of trouble shooting the user account,” he says.
It has become easier for the IT department to manage its software licences. Previously, a user would just use a software application once. Now, the IT team is able to track programs that have been idle for months, and slot them into a stockpile of licences. When a user indicates his request for a program, the division would then forward the tool to the user’s virtual desktop account.
“It is about US$460-$560 for an Office suite but when you’re talking some mining software, it may cost up to US$56,000 and that really adds up. It is better to manage the number of licences we have.”
The low IT set up cost helps make it simple for the company to expand to other countries. “If we want to dabble in other countries, we can start out relatively quickly with low overheads and determine viability there,” says Cowie. “If there’s not, we can pull out. If there is, then we can just expand as we go.”
Disaster recovery
Apart from saving costs and improving user productivity, virtualization can be an important component of an organization’s disaster recovery strategy.
“Virtual servers are not tied to physical servers; this means that an application running in a virtual machine is not tied to a specific physical server,” says Gartner’s Sargeant. “It offers users greater flexibility when it comes to disaster recovery, applications can be restarted very quickly on a virtual machine,” he adds.
ING Insurance’s Wong saw his virtualization project as a good opportunity to replace his 27 aging disaster recovery servers. “The vendor is no longer supporting the servers because they are more than eight years old. What we did was instead of replacing 27 physical servers, we are going to get about seven blade servers and bunk in at least 36 VMs,” says Wong.
As his disaster recovery servers are placed on a rented facility, server virtualization makes sense as he is now able to save on rental space because fewer servers meant less area taken up.
“For example, they charge RM4,000-RM5,000 for one rack per month. We had six to seven racks the last time round. With this solution, I only need two to three racks so half of it is gone. Also, I previously had 27 servers, now I can have 36 VMs and I think we can take even more,” says Wong.
However, utilizing virtualization has to be a well thought out and managed process or else it ends up chewing more resources than it could.
The IT manager had to understand the limits of his or her own virtualization resources. For Wong, his available setup was not enough to accommodate high-end systems like databases before taking up too many resources. Instead he focused on consolidating his organization’s smaller applications such as proxy servers and anti-virus servers.
“Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place,” says Bittman. “Automation is the critical next step to help organizations stop ‘virtualization sprawl’, which is not much better than server sprawl.”
AP’s virtual fascination
The Asia Pacific region’s virtualization software and services market will grow by 42 percent, to reach US$1.35 billion by 2010, according to Springboard Research.
The services segment, estimated to grow to US$1 billion by 2010, will take a major portion of the market. Organizations are expected to spend two to three times more on services than on software.
Springboard says the growth of the overall virtualization market will be powered by steadily increasing interest shown by the region’s CIOs, with 50 percent of them wanting to deploy virtualization solutions over the next 18-24 months. They want virtualization to address issues like low system capacity utilization, poor performance and other challenges associated with managing growing IT infrastructure.
The findings are based on a survey of CIOs from large and mid-sized enterprises in Australia, China, India and Singapore.
Imperative
“Our research indicates that virtualization, at least at the server level, is becoming an imperative and that a growing number of companies will implement virtualization at the server level in 2008,” said Michael Barnes, vice president – software research at Springboard Research.
“The complex nature of engagements with vendors and system integrators while implementing virtualization solutions is a prime reason for virtualization services taking a larger share of the market.”
Key players
VMware is the Asia Pacific virtualization market leader with an estimated 70 percent market share, while Microsoft, Parallels, Virtual Iron and XenSource are other players with significant presence.
The virtualization services market is dominated by key players including IBM, HP, Dell and Sun.
Australia and Korea lead the virtualization marketplace in Asia Pacific due to their well-built infrastructure, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and India are high growth potential markets.
To tap the emerging opportunities in virtualization, system integrators across the region are making significant investments in people and skills development.
