Virtual answer to swelling data centre

Data requirements of firms across all industries are being stretched to their limit and continually adding new servers and hardware is a costly and time- consuming process. One firm which was experiencing such an influx of requirements was office and computer products supplier and services Corporate Express (CXP).

Since adding e-commerce to its business channels nine years ago, CXP has seen online ordering grow to 70 percent of its customer transactions.

To accommodate this growth, CXP had to keep installing new physical servers and ramp up delivery of new applications and projects. This increased administration costs and resource requirements placed greater pressure on IT staff and increased cooling requirements.

“We were the standard server consolidation candidate,” said Travers Nicholas, infrastructure services manager at Corporate Express. “We had a lot of projects coming up and numerous servers in our data centre. We considered IBM, but it was suggested we check out VMware and that’s what we did.”

To curtail the sprawl of physical servers but still service increasing demand, CXP turned to VMware ESX Server as a server virtualisation offering. VMware ESX Server is designed to allow many virtual servers to reside on one physical server in demanding environments such as enterprise data centres.

Deployment of VMware ESX Server has enabled CXP to run more than 150 virtual machines on 17 physical servers, each with two CPU sockets and two CPUs per socket.

The VMware ESX Server environment resides on 17 IBM System x3650 servers with 3GHz Intel processors and 24GB of RAM. The virtualised environment includes more than 80 application servers, 25 web servers, six servers hosting Citrix software and four servers hosting Microsoft Exchange.

CXP has virtualised about 30 to 40 physical servers to date, with the remaining virtual servers deployed under the company’s “virtualise first” policy. Another 25 to 50 physical servers are expected to be virtualised over the next 12 months. To date, CXP has virtualised more than 70 percent of its production, development and testing environment.

“Without the deployment of virtualisation we would have been forced to relocate,” said Nicholas. “Some of the benefits include system management as before we would have to install new servers and hardware, now it is just a few clicks and we are deploying a new server in 10 to 15 minutes. Change management is another benefit as you can patch a system and using snapshot you can roll back if there is a problem with the patch.”

Key benefits of the VMware installation include faster server provisioning by deploying VMware ESX Server enables CXP to deliver a production-ready server in just 20 minutes; improved service delivery as the new virtualised environment maintains availability at periods of peak load and gives business users confidence that downtime will be minimised; simplified application development as CXP is trialling VMware Lab Manager to reduce the time taken to provision development and test environments; improved disaster recovery; and reduced environmental footprint as IT infrastructure is responsible for up to 50 percent of the power consumption of
many organisations.

“VMware comes to us and gives us technical briefs and advice on how we can approach upgrades. We have a VMware sales engineer who keeps us up-to-date on new releases,” said Nicholas. “We are always looking for new opportunities in the virtualisation space as it gives us power and flexibility. We are not a technical company so we look to our vendors and are waiting for VMware’s new releases.”

Nicholas said new VMware developments around continuous availability and flexibility around migrating storage are developments which Corporate Express is following closely.

CXP has been working with reseller partner IMC Communications since 2003 and the firm currently supports CXP’s VMware software licensing.

“IMC is a pretty close reseller for us and supplies all our IBM hardware, software licensing and VMware licensing. All the services from IMC have been top notch, no complaints. When we have needed to call them they have done such a great job and are very responsive,” added Nicholas.

Matt Dickson, director at IMC Communications, said: “We started working with CXP as a provider of
technical consulting and technical project management and we provide general advice and project procurement.”

Concerning the benefits of the VMware installation, Dickson outlined disaster recovery and the consolidation of servers which saves data centre floorspace and power.

“You can also deploy more quickly. Users just have to click a button and have a server ready to go. A few months process can be done in a few minutes,” he said. “VMware is experiencing incredible amounts of growth and it can be hard to keep up with this. It is the fastest growing infrastructure supplier out there at the moment.”

Moving forward, Dickson said IMC will continue to keep CXP abreast of what is going on in the market and continue to service the company around its products, alongside helping CXP with projects.