Despite a lack of blog updates from me, progress has been made
on a number of fronts, the most exciting being our server rationalisation project. With some help from Intel, who saw my video blog, and the sorry state of our server cupboard, we are attempting to make a big dent in our power consumption.
To go to the website and see the video, including Dave’s very informative tour of our server cupboard, click here.
The principles are fairly simple – take a bunch (25 plus in our case) of physical servers, each with their own power requirement, and rationalise them down to a much smaller number of power efficient servers, each running a number of “virtual” servers. From a user perspective the experience is the same, and all of your existing applications and data are carried across.
So in theory this change has a relatively low impact on the business, but a big reduction in power consumption, hopefully to around 25% of the current figures.
The first stage in the process was to audit all of the servers to get an idea of storage requirements, applications supported and processing capacity, which Dave provided to the guys at Intel. They have now come back to use with a proposed infrastructure, which will get us down to 4 main servers, and an implementation plan that shows us how to migrate the existing servers to the new model.
We now need to work out who is going to manage the migration, and what support we need from our instrastructure suppliers to make any physical changes. Oh, and we need to get hold of some lovely shiny new (but very green) servers.
I’m really keen to see some tangible progress on this, as we believe this will have one of the biggest impacts on our energy consumption, but probably not the easiest change to implement. While this is progressing I want to focus on the quick wins, and that may need some focus from the Armstrong staff to help me roll out.
