The need for the efficient use of data center resources was driven home to me recently by a comment from a colleague from Intel speaking at a local event: "The most expensive server you are going to buy is the one that causes you to build the next data center." The comment got the expected chuckles from the audience; followed by a moment of silence ...putting an exclamation point on everyone's own thought processes regarding their growing IT footprint.

During the event (which was focused on data center virtualization issues) I was presented with a number of survey results and speculation on where server virtualization has been and would be going in the next years. One data point was that 50% of the recent usage of server virtualization was deployed to address consolidation and gain efficiency in the data center. Seems obvious, given that server utilization rates have hovered in the ten percent range.

With growing power constraints and budget pressure, efficiency metrics are forefront in the mind of anyone working with large server counts. These metrics are gathered in terms of hardware, watts, and space consumed per transaction delivered. Increasing the utilization of any given component, such as leveraging virtualization to concurrently run multiple OS instances and workloads on a given server, has immediate positive results on that given server's workload processed.

For those companies that have already adopted server virtualization, the next frontier can be found outside the server, across the entire server infrastructure. Servers from a number of vendors, of various capabilities, both physical and virtual, are deployed without the ability to rebalance workload when needed. As demands change, this inability to rapidly re-provision data center assets, and the natural compensation through over-provisioning, results in the low server utilization rates viewed across the entire data center. The provisioning problem applies to virtualized hosts as well; after all, the virtualization solution runs on physical machines as an operating system, so you face the same challenges of deployment, networking, and storage as a physical machine running native Windows, Linux, or Solaris.

At Scalent, we've worked hard to address physical and virtual server efficiency through the implementation of adaptive infrastructure software. With Scalent, you can manage the ongoing allocation of resources and repurposing of servers across disparate virtual and physical machines without losing control over the environment. Our customers have gained agility, automated fail-over, achieved server consolidation, and reduced hardware counts while consolidating environments and dropping a datacenter along the way.

Perhaps the least expensive purchase you'll make this year is the one which eliminates the need for your most expensive server. Come talk to us.

-- Brian Korn, Director, Marketing, June 2007