Page History

...

One problem faced by any IT organization is deciding how to spend money to meet both expected demands and unforeseen needs over a period of time. When you're buying servers or storage with multi-year leases or warranties, you've committed your resources. If a sudden change or need arises, it can be very difficult to react quickly. And with an annual budget process, needs often change rapidly. In addition, there were situations in the past where ongoing maintenance or server costs were not properly budgeted, and replacing that hardware can be a challenge.

Flexibility

Wiki MarkupAs pointed out in \ [Servers at Drew\], we opt to buy very similar, standardized hardware. This  allows us to meet demand by repurposing hardware when needed. Combined with \[virtual servers\], which gives us the ability to provide new or move older services that don't have intensive resource requirements to a single, larger server and we have some ability to react to change quickly. We've had a number of applications in the past year or two (Macromedia Breeze, EZ Proxy, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Novell Netstorage, GroupWise, the GW Guardian anti-spam software) that would have been difficult or impossible to test and/or implement had we not had hardware to shuffle around or the ability to run the application in question on a virtual server.\\This  allows us to meet demand by repurposing hardware when needed. Combined with [virtual servers], which gives us the ability to provide new or move older services that don't have intensive resource requirements to a single, larger server and we have some ability to react to change quickly. We've had a number of applications in the past year or two (Macromedia Breeze, EZ Proxy, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Novell Netstorage, GroupWise, the GW Guardian anti-spam software) that would have been difficult or impossible to test and/or implement had we not had hardware to shuffle around or the ability to run the application in question on a virtual server.

Reacting to Change

Our move to using virtual servers for some applications was fairly aggressive. We realized that we couldn't provide the number of services at a reasonable level of reliability unless we changed how we were doing business, and VMware ESX server had been on the market long enough for us to feel comfortable relying on it. It exceeded our expectations, and we've been able to provide a significant number of services due to it, either directly or indirectly.

...