Bigger Benefits with Dynamic Infrastructure and Virtualization

Virtualization brings with it unique challenges that are best addressed by a dynamic infrastructure. While initially it was believed that virtualization would reduce the number of servers requiring management, the reverse is actually true. In fact, IDC predicted in its "Data Center of the Future" report in March, 2009 that the current 5 virtual machines per server would grow to eight per server by 2012, with research firm Gartner's estimates even higher, indicating VMWare installs average twelve virtual machines per server while Microsoft remains lower at five per server. That's a huge benefit in terms of a reduction in capital expenditures due to virtualization, not to mention the long term operational savings associated with reducing the power and facility costs required to maintain large numbers of physical servers.

What isn't growing is the number of administrators in data centers to manage such phenomenal growth. In the same report, IDC reports that the ratio of administrators to servers for traditional data centers is 1:25 and increases to 1:35 in a virtualized environment. The increase in servers requiring administration without an equal increase in the number of administrators necessarily requires more focus on day-to-day operations and mundane tasks which reduces the efficiency of IT staff.

Dynamic infrastructure, with its integration and automation capabilities, addresses these inefficiencies by providing the means through which tedious and mundane operational tasks can be automated in a virtualized environment, thus increasing the efficiency of IT staff as well as the overall efficiency of data center operations. Automating scheduled maintenance windows is a good example.  Doing so can alleviate the need for staff to be on site during weekends to manually reconfigure load-balancers and infrastructure systems.  Instrumenting application components to notify a centralized orchestration system can remove the manual processes associated with provisioning and de-provisioning of instances. Automation and the systems that drive it can be called upon 24/7, whereas manual processes require the presence of IT staff and thus are more difficult - and expensive - to schedule.

But it is not just efficiencies of staff that can be gained by combining dynamic infrastructure with virtualization. The ability of a dynamic infrastructure to offload application and network-specific tasks from virtual machines can provide a substantial increase in the efficiency of each virtual machine, making consolidation efforts more fruitful while simultaneously improving the performance of applications hosted in virtual environments. By offloading compute intensive tasks like SSL computations, compression, and TCP session management to a dynamic infrastructure solution, applications running in virtual machines are freed to focus on serving applications and executing application-specific logic. This improves performance and scalability of virtual machines by allowing each virtual machine to service more users, more often without degradation.

For example, Transplace, a leading third-party logistics provider recently re-architected their data center with the goal of leveraging virtualization extensively. Using a combination of virtualization and dynamic infrastructure they were able to not only increase the performance of their revenue-generating applications but decreased their data center footprint by employing the server-offload capabilities of the network infrastructure. Combined with a 95 percent virtualized architecture, the company has made more efficient use of its physical hardware while improving the overall user experience, resulting in a reduction in operating costs.

Efficiencies can also be gained through the agile nature of a dynamic infrastructure.  Whether security or application related, there are often "fixes" or "patches" that need to be applied to all servers in an environment. As the number of servers increases in a virtual environment, this becomes both an efficient staff process and further increases the potential for the introduction of errors. By leveraging the programmatic features of a dynamic application delivery platform the process of applying such "fixes" becomes simpler and much more efficient. The modification can be made in one place - the dynamic application delivery platform - and applied to all instances of an application at one time.

The combination of a dynamic infrastructure with virtualization technologies provide significant benefits in terms of IT and server efficiency in the data center. These benefits improve the return on investment in both technologies dramatically and make it possible to avoid the diseconomy of scale inherent in the rapid growth associated with virtualization of the data center.

 

Lori MacVittie, Technical Marketing Manager for Application Services

Lori MacVittie is responsible for outbound marketing, education, and evangelism of application services available across F5’s entire product suite. Her role includes authorship of technical materials and participation in a number of community-based forums and industry standards organizations, among other efforts. MacVittie has extensive programming experience as an application architect, as well as network and systems development and administration expertise.

Prior to joining F5, MacVittie was Senior Technology Editor at Network Computing Magazine, where she conducted product research and evaluation focused on integration with application and network architectures, and authored articles on a variety of topics aimed at IT professionals. Her most recent area of focus included SOA-related products and architectures. She holds a B.S. in Information and Computing Science from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University.