Found out an old friend, from Apple days is at a VC firm, and he liked my focus on Green Data Center. Curious I went through the VC’s portfolio of companies, and I found a couple of Virtualization ones.
The one that jumped out though was Virtera, because they had this simple diagram to illustrate what their solution does.
Green IT is one Solution.
Solutions / Green IT & Consolidation
According to Gartner analysts, by the end of 2008 half of the world’s datacenters won’t have enough energy capacity to meet the power and cooling requirements of the latest high-density computing equipment, such as blade servers. Gartner also estimates that over the next five years most enterprise data centers will spend as much on energy as they do on hardware infrastructure. Energy bills, which traditionally have accounted for less than 10% of an overall IT budget, soon could account for more than half. The need for Green IT has never been greater.
The VIRTERA Approach
Green IT starts with producing environmentally friendly products and adopting options such as virtualization, power management, and proper recycling habits within IT. VIRTERA can take you all the way with our Green IT virtual infrastructure solutions. The VIRTERA approach ensures that your Green IT solution is customized to your organization and delivers strong ROI by:
- Determining your server consolidation ratio.
- Testing your infrastructure to measure the minimum and maximum workloads of all of your servers and infrastructure components.
- Ensuring that we don’t overtax a server.
- Building in controls to ensure that application SLAs are met.
- Making adjustments for unexpected spikes after deployment for the best server balance.
Data Center Optimization is another.
Solutions / Data Center Optimization
Ever increasing IT labor costs are now the single largest expense in the data center, at times representing up to 70% of an IT operations budget. What’s more, the challenge to keep up with increasing power and cooling costs – now eight times greater than 10 years ago – and increasing security and compliance demands have drained IT resources and the required funding needed for new projects. The simple answer to these complexities is VIRTERA.
The VIRTERA Approach
VIRTERA’s Data Center Optimization solution gives you the ability to dynamically and transparently allocate IT infrastructure resources based on business needs. We can help you achieve simplicity, agility and efficiency in the data center as well as take a service management approach to your business. As such you'll have improved visibility into business operation and be able to control risks, manage compliance and leverage automation.
In this way, VIRTERA can help you solve the following challenges as part of the transformation to an optimized data center:
- Vendor selection – Our agnostic approach means no vendor lock-in or proprietary vendor solution is due.
- Organizational challenges - Understand the benefits of shared IT resources as opposed to the culture of “owning” a server.
- Cost allocation – Have the ability to measure usage of virtual or physical assets and “charge back” the costs.
I am most curious about their system for Cost Allocation. I highlighted this above.
This gives me a good excuse to have more discussions with my friend as we haven’t talked for years back when he was Cisco’s CIO.
I hope to get more details from Virtera on how they calculate cost allocations, and how it compares to solutions like VMware’s.