How to Use Virtualization to Save Money and Improve Service Quality (
Page 1 of 4 )
Our
IT organization began its virtualization and automation journey with a
limited number of key objectives. We wanted to obtain the maximum
return on existing investments in server and storage resources and
become more responsive to the needs of our software developers. We were
pleasantly surprised to discover significant side benefits that far
exceeded the objectives of our original plan. These side benefits
included labor savings within the IT organization and productivity
gains within our R&D teams.
Our IT organization achieved the
typical virtues of virtualization such as improving the utilization of
existing assets and minimizing additional hardware purchases. For
example, server reuse by multiple development teams saved more than $5M
in avoided procurement costs. These efforts also reduced power
consumption and data center floor space requirements by 20 percent. The
financial payback of our investment in virtualization, which was
approximately $2M, was achieved in less than six months.
Automation procedures that were
implemented as part of our virtualization initiative dramatically
improved our ability to respond to developer requests for data center
resources. The speed and predictability of our response times, in turn,
has made the developers less possessive of "their" assets and more
willing to return underutilized resources to the virtual pool for reuse
by others. Developers have become increasingly confident in our ability
to satisfy their needs on a just-in-time (JIT) basis.
Although it's difficult to
precisely estimate the time savings for developers through the new
provisioning process, lead times for individual requests have been
reduced by at least 10 to 15 workdays. This is equivalent to a
collective reduction in lead times of 360 work months per quarter for a
1,500-person development organization operating in five distinct
locations.
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