It was the summer of 1999, and my best friend told me I had to see this new movie called The Matrix. I sat alone in the Ioka Theater in downtown Exeter crunching popcorn, completely immersed in the virtual world of this now cult classic. I was among the many whose imaginations were captured by the possibilities of operating in a world without the limitations of physics and the physical. While it's more fun to think about what this would mean for us as humans-dodging bullets and leaping from rooftop to rooftop-it's more lucrative to realize what it means for today's businesses.
So what is virtualization? In your company's network, instead of having one piece of hardware for each server, you have one piece of hardware that contains several servers known as virtual servers, allowing several servers to share the same resources. It's like when you had five roommates in one apartment in college; you all shared resources and expenses like gas, electricity and rent. This analogy would be perfect if you and your roommates also thought you were living alone in the apartment.
This dissociation from the physical hardware also frees your network from the limitations of the physical. If you saw The Matrix, you probably remember the scene where two of the main characters, Neo and Trinity, needed to fly a helicopter in order to escape danger. Neo asks, Can you fly that thing? and Trinity responded, Not yet. Because she is in the virtual world of the Matrix, she has the pilot program for the helicopter downloaded to her brain and, within seconds, they fly off. She was not bound by the physical need to spend years learning how to fly and was able to respond to a need quickly. With the freedom of a virtual network, business problems are now solved with that same kind of speed and ease.
Doing Business Faster
Shawn Linscott, senior network administrator for Frisbie Memorial Hospital in Rochester, was given the task of improving the way prescriptions were handled. Like most things in business, prescriptions have evolved from paper to electronic prescriptions or E-Rx. With E-Rx, as long as the pharmacy is a subscriber to the same cloud service as the hospital, the doctor can send a prescription electronically into a pharmacist's queue. A while back, Linscott virtualized part of the hospital's network. When the request to implement this service came to him, he was able to respond to this business need quickly.
We were able to turn on that feature [E-Rx] in a matter of hours with no physical set up, something that would have previously taken about 45 days, explains Linscott. We didn't have to spec, procure and build physical servers. We simply spun up virtual servers and were testing the service the next day. It is in this way virtualization allows me, as network administrator, to respond to the business needs of the hospital much quicker, more efficiently and with less cost.
If we consider the possibilities of this kind of flexibility, it changes the way we think about making changes to a network and plan for projects. At Frisbie Memorial Hospital, the savings achieved through virtualization went beyond eliminating additional hardware and having the new server share resources efficiently with existing servers. It was also because the impact to his staff was greatly reduced due to the flexibility and ease of adding the server quickly to the virtual environment. In a traditional scenario, his staff would have been tied up on the project for more than a month. In this case, the bulk of the work was completed in hours, allowing them to move on to other needs.
Saving Space and Time
Let's look at what this means for a large project. If you think back to the virtual world of The Matrix, you may remember that, at one point, when our hero was asked what he needed, he responded, Guns, lots of guns. He was in the virtual world, so instantly racks and racks of guns appeared. In the physical world, it would have taken hours for him to collect what he needed, even if they were already in a warehouse next door, never mind if they needed to be manufactured or assembled.
So what if you're an IT director and you're asked that question, What do you need? and the answer is, Servers, lots of servers. When John Eisfeller, director of Information Technology at MeetingMatrix International Inc. in Portsmouth, had to answer that question, he answered it with virtualization.
We knew that we would need to bring several servers online throughout the year. We virtualized to speed up that process, Eisfeller explains. We now run 27 servers in the virtual environment. It has given us a lot more flexibility when adding and removing services and/or servers. If you have to add hardware, it could take an entire day to rack the server. You need the rack space to put it into. It could take another day to create the rack space. A virtual server is up in 30 minutes.
Like Meeting Matrix, many companies are renting their rack space in a co-location. Eisfeller says virtualization reduced the company's costs. The up front cost [of virtualizing] is substantial, but once you have it, it's a huge savings on the backend, Eisfeller says. We save on time, rack space and electricity. We have 27 servers in a space that would only hold five hard servers. When you rent the rack space, that's a big savings.
It gets better for MeetingMatrix. That small five hard server space doesn't just hold servers. It holds desktops as well, giving the company the same level of flexibility on a workstation level. Eisfeller says that because of this, they are able to use their virtual environment to adapt quickly to their associates' needs. We're able to set up a virtual desktop with all the software they need in 20 minutes, Eisfeller says. Then they just remote in from their personal computer and they can be immediately productive.
It's clear that flexibility and cost saving are the most direct benefits virtualization has to offer, but when we take a closer look at the capabilities of the technology, we find other benefits. The Matrix introduced us to the idea of the construct-a place where people went to try things and learn skills separate from the world in which they would use those skills. On a virtual network, we would call that place a test environment, which is separate from our production environment that we spend our day working in. Eisfeller uses this test environment regularly. We can bring up a server to test it, then take it down easily without affecting production, he says.
It's a process that previously required all the expense of setting up and maintaining physical hardware, which in some cases may require desktops and switches in addition to servers. In a virtual network, that test environment comes into existence, changes to suit the needs of the test and goes away with almost zero financial impact to the company and no impact to production.
As you look into the possibilities of a technology that frees your network from the physical limitations of hardware, you may find virtualization solves a myriad of other business needs and concerns that are specific to your business and network. n
Mark Miller is a senior account manager with Axis Business Solutions in Portsmouth. He can be reached at 603-294-4978 or mar@axisbusiness.com. For more information, visit www.axisbusiness.com.
Current Issue - May 2024