Mother Nature speeds school district virtualization project

Be the first to comment | 4I like it!
March 11, 2009, 03:15 PM —  Network World — 

The road to virtualization for Michael Riggs was covered with five feet of snow, which it turns out was a blessing.

The systems engineer with Falcon School District 49 near Colorado Springs, Colo., had his entire data center fried by a Christmas-time blizzard in 2006 that covered the site's air conditioning compressors under a snow drift. The drifts, coupled with closed roadways, made data center rescue impossible

The result was an internal data center temperature of 130 degrees that baked for 12 hours, and an insurance check that provided the needed funds for a virtualization project.

"We got a bailout before bailouts were popular," he said during his virtualization-track presentation at Network World's IT Roadmap Conference in Denver.

(Next IT Roadmap stop: April 2 in Chicago) 

But he doesn't advocate waiting for an act of God to get started with virtualization. He says he has never looked back.
The school district now has 50 virtualized servers housed on two physical hosts running VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) in a data center that supports some 1,500 teachers and staff.

Along the way Riggs learned to deal with virtual machine sprawl and how to virtualize Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint Server and SQL Server.

And the school district was able to cut its power and cooling costs in the data center by 50%.

"We really have no regrets," Riggs said. "With two clicks we can instantiate a VM. There is no greater feeling in the world as an SE then to bring up a half dozen servers for test, or production even, and not waste my morning let alone six weeks trying to provision things."

Riggs is now in Phase 3 of the project, which focuses on setting up a disaster-recovery site and getting VMware's VCenter Site Recovery Manger deployed.

The school district's virtualization infrastructure is based two HP DL 585 servers with dual-core quad processors with 32GB of RAM.

"We are seeing 70% utilization," Riggs said.

So far, the district has virtualized all its data center applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Close

On Twitter now

virtualization

Powered by Twitter
You are logged in | Sign out
Sign in and post to Twitter

What are you thinking?

Cancel Tweet sent

On Twitter now

Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

Esther Schindler
If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly

claird
SVG a graphics format for 21st century

pasmith
Take Chrome OS for a test spin

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Solaris Tip: Have Your Files Changed Since Installation?

sjvn
64-bits of protection?

jfruh
Android fragments vs. the iPhone monolith

mikelgan
What Gizmodo missed about the Pro WX Wireless USB disk drive

 

Where Google Chrome security fails: the password
I heard mention that the Chrome OS will have some sort of encryption available a la bitlocker. If it's possible to encrypt personal data using another password or key, then it may have potential for very secure data.... And Ubuntu has an 'encrypt home directory' option, perhaps google should follow suit.
- Dann

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace