This is very important as clients are building a dynamic infrastructure as assets are consolidated and virtualized it means single machines will run many virtual machines. This means that commodity servers are unable to handle the workload and present the client with points of failure.

The Key to cost savings is to get more Virtual servers on a machine. In order to maintain service levels, the ideal server would be an Enterprise Server, the most powerful and reliable machine out there because so many virtual machines are affected by an outage. Resources such as network and storage interfaces are shared and Enterprise Servers have greater throughput. Blue Iron recommends IBM X series Servers.

Another key component for Dynamic Infrastructure is shared storage as virtual machines require shared storage. Shared Storage can be SAN or IP SAN or NAS, Traditional Storage can offer some challenges as about 25% of the Storage is usable to limitations of the architecture also downtime is required to more it around. Virtual Storage presents itself to the Server as a pool of storage resources that can be provisioned or returned without Server Downtime. Virtual storage utilizes up to 50% of total storage through improved efficiencies.

IBM storage products contain powerful Software as well. Snap technology allows you to create a space efficient copy of your data it allows you to store 256 of them on line so a snap can be made every hour. Hourly Snapshots can provide a client with a faster and more complete recovery than the tape backup from the night before which could take hours to restore a Snapshot can be restored in a matter of minutes. Other software offering include Thin provisioning and de-duplication, both technologies reduce the amount of storage required, by allowing for oversubscription and the removal of repetitive files.

VMware is the Market leader in server, and desktop Virtualization. VMware is in all of the Fortune 100 companies. VMware has the most has the most complete set of tools that Virtualize, Automate, and provide High Availability. VMware helps companies reduce cost by consolidating the number of servers required to run a company’s applications thus reducing cost and returning investment on existing Infrastructure. VMware controls future acquisition costs be providing additional capacity for new applications to be provisioned on the existing infrastructure, this is called containment.

Blue Iron recommends VMware as a part of Dynamic infrastructure solutions to Virtualize Windows and LINUX servers. VMware can run up to 50 virtual machines on IBM’s Award winning X3850 M2 Server. A pair of these servers can run VMware’s ESX server faster than any other server on the market today. ESX allows for multiple Virtual machines to run on single machine, with VMotion a virtual machine can be moved live from one ESX server to another to perform service or mach room for new applications. With DRS a server is moved from one ESX Server to another automatically to prevent performance issues. With HA all severs are moved from one server to another in the event of an ESX server outage.

For UNIX servers Blue Iron recommends IBM PowerVM for UNIX based Virtualization on IBM p Series platform which uses hardware based partitioning to allow virtual machines that run on one tenth of a processor and allows memory and CPU resources to be pooled to service applications on an ON Demand basis it also delivers live partition Mobility which allows for a virtual machine to be moved from on machine to another.

No infrastructure solution is complete without quality Planning, implementation, skills transfer, documentation, and system health services. Blue Iron Provide 3 Services package Assessment services for determining the utilization of existing assets, Smooth Starts for on time implementations and HealthChecks to rejuvenate existing assets.

How do all of these components come together to form a Dynamic Infrastructure?
Now Blue Iron provides an Infrastructure SmoothStart to insure that our clients Dynamic Infrastructure solution is implemented on time, within budget and a state that our clients can confidently take control of. Blue Iron is never more than a phone call away, to assist our clients with their new Dynamic Infrastructure. From time to time we recommend that we revisit the solution to perform an Infrastructure HealthCheck This allows us to rejuvenate the environment, to capacity plan and to insure best practices are implemented.

How much does this all cost?
A few years ago a Dynamic Infrastructure would be out of reach for most companies. Today Dynamic Infrastructure can be had by any company. At Blue Iron we are committed to bringing Dynamic Infrastructure to any size company. All Blue Iron Infrastructure solutions pay for themselves within a one year.