BMW Group is
virtualising its datacentre to gain operational advantages and
cut costs.
The move is designed to reduce hardware costs and simplify
deployment.
After testing by the BMW IT Research Centre in North America and
Germany, the car manufacturer is going to deploy virtualised
datacentre solutions using Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 with the
open source Xen hypervisor on x86 servers using
Intel dual-core processors.
BMW said the deployment will allow it to increase flexibility in
managing server life cycles. BMW will also gain operational and
cost advantages in other areas, in addition to having a flatter
support structure through the integrated operating system and
virtualisation layer, said the car firm.
Hardware resources can also be more efficiently used through
server consolidation, and BMW is able to cluster virtual servers
and migrate them live from one physical server to another as
needed.
The company is also currently evaluating Novell Zenworks
Orchestrator as a way to manage the resulting virtual datacentre
systems.
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BMW IT
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