Data Center Consolidation Sparks Converged Infrastructure Deployment
Posted by
Paul Korzeniowski
January 27, 2011
The HP StorageWorks EVA4400 was deployed as a network attached storage system for the mainframe and also acts as a virtual tape library. The latter meant disk-to-disk backups, which led to a 50 percent reduction in tape costs. Another plus from the move to the virtual tape system was reduced retrieval time. Rather than a couple of days, the time to restore information was cut to a few hours.
In 2010, the multimillion dollar project hit some major milestones. While the initial plan was to complete the process in 18 months, much of the work involved with building the new data center was finished after about eight months. Because of the change, the company was able to consolidate 600 servers to 130 servers and realize a10-fold reduction in server racks, from 30 to three. Another plus was data center productivity gains. Using virtual machines cut the time needed to provision a new server from four weeks to four hours.
The end result was significant reduced operating costs. With fewer physical servers, maintenance and licensing costs went down about 30 percent, and power and cooling costs dropped 40 percent. In addition, the company cut its staff by 30 percent--largely individuals who did not want to relocate.
Also, the IT infrastructure became more resilient. The new system allows SIRVA to automatically load-balance virtual machine resources across blade chassis, so, for instance, they can automatically move workloads from failing hardware to other functioning devices.
The company did encounter a few hiccups."Because the infrastructure is so different, we had to invest a lot of time training of the staff," explains Schmayel. In some cases, key technicians attended training classes that lasted a full week, which stretched the staff thin.
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