Sitting in on a talk by a Ford senior manager named Eric Karsten recently at the IDC IT Forum in Boston, I heard him say that while the car maker is pretty much all virtualization all the time in an effort to do more with less, there is one group of holdouts:
“Most often the guys who tell me we can’t virtualize are the research guys,” he said. They want to own and be able to physically touch the servers their data is running on, he said.
During lunch at the event, other IT pros said the same was true at their outfits.
Meanwhile, Ford has adopted server, storage and network virtualization in a big way, cranking up usage of resources that were once badly underutilized (he mentioned a few hundred customer-facing servers that back in 2004 were only 5%-8% utilized, for example). Ford has drastically reduced its number of data centers and doesn’t foresee needing to increase its number of servers.
The move to virtualization hasn’t been perfect. Ford does see virtual machine sprawl and has faced issues with licensing costs as software vendors change around their models on a regular basis.
On Karsten’s wishlist: consolidated autonomic provisioning of servers, storage and networks. He said he’s seen some interesting custom portals that address this, but hasn’t seen off-the-shelf tools.
