How Virtualization compares to traditional Colocation.
In the traditional colocation environment, most stand-alone physical servers are operated for a single task. Those who seek better uptime will cluster multiple servers together to provide redundancy and high availability for that single task! It's important to note that in colocation, you must provide enough physical servers to handle the PEAK loads. That means that you must invest in large amounts of IT infrastructure to provide an acceptable experience when your servers are busy. And that means and large percentage of those servers will sit IDLE the majority of the time. A physical server typically uses less than 8% of its stated capacity while performing its primary task. The same server will draw 1.8 amps of power 24 x 7 x 365. Power hungry servers continue to spin disks and consume cooling even when idle, wasting more than 90% of their resources just waiting to be used! We recently needed to refresh a group of servers. In our own real world tests, we consolidated 21 physical servers into a cluster of 4 physical servers running VMware and INCREASED the number of Virtual Machines running, providing better peak load performance and greater redundancy.By implementing Virtualization, we saved:
- 32 amps of electrical power (and cooling!) per month.
- Capital expenditure of replacing aged hardware one for one.
- Maintenance and support contract management with hardware vendors.
- Physical space for replacement equipment.