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Rethink The Business Case?: Page 2 of 2

Every P2V business case is about cost savings, right? You know the pitch; consolidation will set you (and your budget) free. PR firms are even touting virtualization as the saving grace for budget woes in the coming Dark Age, er, recession. What if I told you that IT pros up and down the food chain are looking at VM'ing to resolve server-build hassles and a list of other operational woes? What if I said those same folks are expecting costs to be neutral, or higher for P2V, but
March 21, 2008

Guida, Ramanathan, and I had a lot to talk about. But I'm still drawn back to customers moving to virtualization knowing that it will cost them more. I've interviewed IT admins from the small end of the market up through service managers at Fortune 500s. All agree that virtualization makes operational sense. Few agree that they could get a VM case approved without clear $$$ savings. Those folks are waiting for Hyper-V.

Last week I caught up with Jonathan Bryce, co-founder of Mosso, to get his two cents on VM management concerns. Bryce relies on Hyperic to stay on top of his ESX farm. Mosso markets its hosting as 'cloud technology.' Mosso hosts over 30K sites out of Rackspace (of which they are a subsidiary). The pitch is that customers shouldn't need to worry about servers, SANs, or operating systems; customers should only need to think of their site. The nuts and bolts should be reduced to magic behind the curtain. That magic 'cloud' of Linux and Windows servers exists in ESX-space. (Magic is my word choice and, no, I didn't ask if Rackspace is running on HP gear.)

The Mosso environment is so dynamic that neither human administrators nor in-house management tools could deliver the level of flexibility and response required to meet SLAs. Mosso brought Hyperic on board to get everything under control. It also needed to invest in additional storage, networking, and CPUs.

Virtualization tech was built into Mosso's business model from the start. A part of the initial benefit expectation was cost savings, thanks to optimized hosts.

Let's just say the savings part of Mosso's virtualization equation did not live up to projections. The other side of that VM coin is operational flexibility, which Mosso is more than willing to pay for. How many others are quietly coming to the same conclusion?
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