Information Technology Virtualized Server Update Scott Baily, ACNS UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Proposal One (Dec. 2010) Replace 10 (two generations old) IBM servers with 2 current generation IBM servers Possible by using “Virtual Machine” technology Original proposal cost estimate: $128K What These Servers Do Aries SIS test and development Tivoli file backup and restore services Used for virtually all centrally managed systems Other misc. central IT service -Talk to you in December about planned project to replace several older servers with two new boxes deployed in a clustered format and using virtualization to maximize the investment by reducing environmental costs, maint costs while providing an exponential improvement in processor capacity -The systems being upgraded in this project support several areas used by students and used to support the ARIES SIS UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

This Proposal was Approved Provost funded $64K Central IT (IS and ACNS) funded $54K UTFAB funded $10K This project was funded through a partnership UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Second Proposal: Why virtualize only test and development servers? Test/Dev environments should replicate, to the extent possible, the production systems they shadow Benefits of virtualization certainly apply to production systems as well UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Second Proposal, cont’d Replace 19 (generations-old) IBM servers with four current, very capable servers 84% of these 19 servers support student apps Application and Database Servers Other auxiliary services also included As we begin to plan the upgrade with technical staff the question that kept coming up was why not include production systems in the mix – Originally we were looking at replacing oldest systems Took a look at what that would mean to replace servers supporting other services as well and re-purposing those systems to continuity planning efforts – so we began looking at the configuration and considered what flexibility it would provide us in going forward and it presented some promising options So we asked our vendor partners to take another look and recommend a solution to that would allow us to accomplish more UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Second Proposal Cost Estimate $378K total cost, includes all four servers $128K already funded $64K from Provost $54K from IS/ACNS $10K from UTFAB $250K remained unfunded UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Second Funding Request $150K, In addition to $10K committed in December $378 project total; UTFAB’s portion is 42.3% of total 84% of systems related to Student Support Applications Central funding for the balance $100K IS/ACNS (40%) UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Status Server cluster is up Performance of VMs is excellent But not without significant challenges! IBM’s virtual server implementation significantly different than VMWare and Hyper-V Performance of VMs is excellent All central servers to be migrated have been upgraded, ready to transition Simply a matter of scheduling downtime, minimizing impact to student applications -Hardware and software maintenance w/o considering inflation, so this is a conservation estimate -The newer hardware is much more energy efficient and virtualization provides an opportunity for energy rebate UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Benefits Better performance Better redundancy Reduced power and cooling requirement Hardware maintenance savings UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Questions Are most welcome UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Storage Proposal This project was so important, that we focused all of our attention last year on it, now… Server virtualization is great! But, only part of the overall solution… UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

The Problem Significant amount of old storage systems, placing CSU IT at significant risk UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

The Problem (Cont’d) Currently, systems have dedicated storage Management nightmare Inefficient and inflexible Disruptive – reconfigurations require downtime (if even possible) Current disks very expensive to maintain and expand Incompatible connectivity (fibre channel, iscsi, etc.) UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

The Risks 6-7 year old storage is ‘beyond the pale’ Current approach does not provide redundancy in storage as data resides in a single location need redundancy to protect data and ensure availability Data backups and restores take too long ODS Down 2 days recently due to disk issue and restoral time IS disk issues resulted in 2 day outage (June 2010) We cannot effectively manage exponential data growth Failure to do so is not an option! UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Growth Pains RamCT growing 40 GB / month Nightly “changed” backups have grown to 10TB / night Space consumption is on a steady and substantial rise VM as a service to campus likely to require hundreds of additional TB UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

The situation today UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

The Solution Install a storage virtualization solution between current storage and servers Allows current storage to be upgraded over time Allows on-the-fly expansion with no downtime Permits data replication (no restoral from backup system) Facilitates common, standards-based solutions flexible disk management Similar advantages to server virtualization! UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

The Solution (Cont’d) Virtualizing storage allows management of disparate disk systems as a single pool Single point of management simplifies administration Combining storage into one pool allows dynamic movement of data between tiers of storage If an application suddenly needs more IO performance, this can be accommodated immediately with no downtime Backups are far faster and more granular, afforded by new capabilities that come with virtualization UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Cost* Software and support: $190K Hardware cost $ 40K BYO Storage (5@$12K ea) $ 60K Total $290K Adds > 300 Tbytes of flexible, robust storage *Based on documented quote, Oct. 2011 UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Proposal Since ~ 70% of disk in use today supports student-related activities, consider funding 70% of the $290K ($203K) We will seek central funding for the $87K remainder from the Provost Central IT is about ‘tapped out’ UTFAB Update November 15, 2011

Questions Are again most welcome UTFAB Update November 15, 2011