I attended a thought leadership session at Vmworld today,  “Conquering Costs and Complexity in a Virtualized Environment”. In 1996, there were roughly 6 million servers. In 2009, that number has increased to nearly 32 million servers. In the presentation link below, HP & IDC outline graphs of expenses and the rise in costs which are baffling. What is the largest cost? People. Next? Power & cooling. A big point brought up at the session was, ‘who heard of power capping from the local utility center 10 years ago’? Well, no one. But with city infrastructures being tapped too hard, it had to happen. Draw these lines for expenses for management, power and cooling and utility costs on a graph looking five years out - it will be unmanageable. A few great comments that came out of the meeting: “Find that real estate management person who’s paying the power bill and that one will help you make the argument for virtualization and justify consolidation.”  and “5 ‘9s’?  no. need all ‘9s’. 100% availability. Web commerce doesn’t wait an hour.”

Virtualization is helping but needs to attack the growing costs and ongoing management of the datacenter, flipping the expense of operation to expense on innovation. The session leaders spoke of the data center as a system relationships & new innovations and management tools need a holistic approach.

From Mark Linesch, the HP session leader:

Virtualization has sparked an overall industry discussion on the changing face of the datacenter. It has helped increase utilization rates and been a major disruptor to traditional data center operations. With the number of virtual machines exploding however, virtualization has also introduced new challenges and opportunities on the transformational journey to conquer costs and complexity and move toward a shared and service-oriented data center environment.  

Our session at VMworld 2009 is all about tackling the issues AFTER those first early successes have been achieved. Armed with the latest research from Michelle Bailey at IDC, we discuss the facts about virtual sprawl and the need to rethink IT management and processes. 

For example, many organizations are beginning to use vMotion-type capabilities in their production environments. As part of our session, we discuss how customers can further lower costs and dramatically increase their ROI from VMware with automation tools and experience. We also tackle energy as IT managers re-architect the datacenter and implement a broad range of solutions to fit more servers into existing power and space constraints. It still amazes me that today’s G6 ProLiant servers from HP can increase  performance by up to 10x while reducing power consumption by 10x – saving costs and lowering energy consumption. But this is just the beginning of a comprehensive strategy that is needed to lower costs and reclaim power within existing data center environments.

Here are some take-aways from the session:

•       Download our whitepapers:

−       Orchestration for the Business-Driven Data Center http://www.eds.com/insights/whitepapers/5846/ 

−       Realizing TCO Savings with HP BladeSystem Virtual  Connect Flex-10 Technology, IDC Whitepaper

         http://www.hp.com/go/realizing-tco

•       Navy Marine Corps Intranet case study:  http://www.eds.com/insights/casestudies/nmci-virtualizing-servers.aspx

Here are the slides from HP & IDC presented at the session. http://www.slideshare.net/HPintheEnterprise/conquering-costs-and-complexity-in-a-virtualized-environment

Presenting today were:
Mark Linesch Vice President, Strategy and Portfolio Management, Enterprise Servers and Networking
HP
Rob Taylor Vice President, Data Center Services, Infrastructure Services, EDS an HP company
HP
Michelle Bailey Research Vice President, Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends
IDC

We would look forward to any feedback and thoughts on this topic.