Before embarking on a full-blown
virtualisation roll-out, many organisations try a small pilot
first. This is exactly the approach the Northern Ireland Civil
Service has taken. IT Assist, which was set up in April 2007 as a
result of consolidating and centralising eight separate
departments, started its virtualisation pilot project about 12
months ago.
Caron Alexander, head of technology for the IT Assist shared
service centre at the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS), says,
"It is important to start small and prove that the technology works
in order to build confidence and get stakeholder buy-in. With a
small project, people can see the benefits quickly without there
being high up-front costs and that makes it much easier to move
forward and do bigger things," says Alexander.
Following the creation of two datacentres, one of which is used
for disaster recovery purposes, the decision was taken to find ways
to rationalise and consolidate NICS' x86 server estate. The
majority of machines were located in individual departments, but
the aim was to migrate them to the main site over time, before
subsequently virtualising them using EMC's VMware software, says
Alexander.
Business case
"In terms of the business case, reducing cost was a huge thing.
Things are financially tight and so we wanted to cut costs in
relation to space, server build costs, licensing and support," she
explains.
"But sustainability and anything to do with reducing the carbon
footprint in government and the Northern Ireland Civil Service is
also huge and this was an area where we could make a real
contribution."
Resilience was another key issue, however. "If a virtual server
fails, the load will automatically be put onto another machine of
the same build and it happens almost instantly, which would never
happen with physical servers. You would have to do back-up and
restore, but it is a much cleaner, slicker contingency in the
virtual world," Alexander says.
As a result, the Northern Ireland Civil Service decided to
undertake a pilot project to test these ideas out and gain more
experience of the technology. Although IT staff had already worked
on some tactical deployments, it was felt that more knowledge and
experience was required to assess and exploit its full
potential.
Pilot benefits
"People tend to do pilots when there is potential nervousness as
they have not dealt with the technology much before and so they do
not want to do a big bang implementation. It is about ensuring that
you want to move forward, looking at lessons learned and phasing
those into a larger project," Alexander explains.
The team identified a group of about 53 web servers out of a
total estate of 200 that were already hosted at the main datacentre
as being the most suitable candidates.
Consultants from Dell Services were then brought in to audit the
machines and provide information on how they were used and what
would be the best approach going forwards.
The final report indicated that due to low levels of resource
utilisation, a lot of redundancy existed in the current set-up and
it, therefore, advised that the number of physical servers be
consolidated down to 10, which is a ratio of about 8:1.
This represents significant cost savings for IT Assist as it
leases its datacentre space and can, therefore, pay for every rack
in the datacentre.
A key benefit of going down this route, says Alexander, was that
it "gave us a recommendation that could be cost-justified,
particularly in terms of space reduction. There were power
advantages too and, while they were not huge, there was a marked
improvement".
Stakeholder buy-in
Another lesson learned from the pilot scheme was the importance
of obtaining stakeholder buy-in to initiatives of this type.
"The thing about change is that no one likes it really and so
there were concerns about 'why risk changing something that is not
broken', even if it is the best way to do it. So it was about
bringing people along and keeping them involved so that they could
see the benefits for themselves," says Alexander.
The next stage of the initiative, meanwhile, will involve
virtualising the final tranche of web servers, before starting to
undertake audits of line of business machines in order to
consolidate and virtualise them too.
But IT Assist is also working with the Enterprise Design
Authority to explore the benefits in terms of supportability,
security and cost-effectiveness of adopting desktop virtualisation
technology over the next three to five years.
The authority is responsible for helping NICS create a
standards-based IT infrastructure and for providing advice to other
Northern Irish public sector bodies.