You feel it at the gas station, see it in the housing crisis, and hear about the losses hitting the biggest banks on Wall Street, so don't ignore the current state of the economy. The government will most likely declare a recession, which sometimes occurs after the worst is over. A recent example was the recession in the 1990's which started in July 1990, but wasn't declared until April 1991, ended in March 1991 but wasn't declared over until December 1992 (Source: National Bureau of Economic Research). Don't wait for a recession notice before you look at ways to cut IT costs in a tight economy.

There are ways for companies to cut IT costs while gaining efficiencies and come out with a much more flexible IT environment. Let's consider a comparison between cars and data centers. There are a lot of Hummers and Land Rovers on the highway these days, which makes sense if you're always driving through the African Serengeti or are fully-burdened with kids, dogs, and camping equipment for a weekend getaway. But much of the time, large SUV owners are simply over-provisioned due to the cost-prohibitive nature of trading in and out from one vehicle to another. Similarly, data centers have big footprints and consume power at rates sized for peak, which more often than not delivers underutilized and inefficient results.

Further exacerbating the problem, many companies have deployed Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) software as their solution for server availability. VCS leverages a two or more dedicated servers to replace a single server, each with their own operating environment, applications, and resulting infrastructure, services, licensing, power and real estate consumption to go with it. With this solution, data center costs can double, but your service stays up in the event of a failure.

So, the question of the day is how many servers do you have doubled up right now?

At Scalent we have taken a different approach, one that does not require the static association of dedicated hardware to enable server failover. Scalent's infrastructure virtualization, applied to server fail-over, essentially allows for any production server to be replaced in boot time, or about 5 minutes. Rather than relying on static, pre-deployed backup machines, Scalent can failover your production servers, moving the storage and network from a failed server to a replacement server automatically, which eliminates the need for VCS licenses as well as the multiple copies of OS and applications being leveraged.

What about servers for which 5-minute replacement is not good enough?

Simple. Keep using your current HA solution for these servers. When failures actually occur, the service will keep running and Scalent V/OE can replace the failed server in boot time, which limits the time you are exposed to running in a degraded mode to about 5 minutes. You might be surprised looking through your deployed services to find that the vast majority of these services fall into the category of store-and-forward applications, for which boot time replacement is good enough.

Want to decommission a few servers with their associated software and support costs? Call us.

Alana Achterkirchen, Director of Marketing, Spring 2008