Data Center Management

Make Your Data Center Efficient

If you're like most people, your data center looks a lot more productive than it really is. After all, the lights are blinking, the coolers are humming and the racks are steadily filling up as you add new applications.

Look a little closer. The truth is that the average data center operates at a fraction of its total capacity. In fact, most of those servers blinking away on your racks probably have mountains of untapped capability that you should be using before you ever think about adding another machine to your data center.

As you know, deploying a new server-based application can be a complex, time-consuming, and costly proposition. You have to choose hardware, install an OS, change controls, tune parameters, calculate memory requirements, find adequate disk space, and then, finally, perform the install. Gartner research shows that over 96% of data centers run a mixture of platforms, so you will also have to contend with platform differences as well.

PlateSpin PowerRecon can discover 65,000 servers in less than 10 minutes.

But in spite of all these costs, the majority of today's data centers (believe it or not) still run one application stack on one server, perpetuating server sprawl and consuming more and more budget every year.

If you are under pressure to reduce capital hardware expenditures by purchasing fewer servers, you need a way to take advantage of all that untapped capability sitting idle in your existing servers.

You also need an easy way to monitor and continuously balance the workload between physical and virtual machines. You need to ensure that any given job is streamed to the most appropriate physical or virtual infrastructure based on resource supply and application workload demand.

If your data center is full of one-trick-pony servers, you are leaving a lot of server capability on the table.

Ready to change that?

Virtualization

Virtualization can improve hardware utilization and significantly reduce server sprawl in data centers. By allowing multiple applications to coexist on one physical server, virtualization enables you to use your resources more efficiently.

With Virtualization from Novell, you can consolidate applications from multiple under-used servers onto one powerful server. And PlateSpin provides the only completely integrated product suite that automates the assessment and consolidation phases of the project—from start to finish.

Accelerate your server consolidation and virtualization from years to weeks. Automate the measurement, analysis, capacity planning and movement of thousands of servers into virtual environments.

It's time to start expecting more from your servers. We can help.

Reduce Your Data Center Costs

Budget is always a driving factor in data center decisions, large and small. For example, data center growth typically increases power consumption, floor and rack space requirements and cooling needs. With energy costs increasing, computer energy consumption has become a major concern for data centers.

Another budget-buster, with potentially ruinous consequences if not handled properly, is disaster recovery. You need an affordable server protection plan that leverages the power of virtualization technology.

Essent, a large Dutch Energy Company, consolidated three data centers into one, saving over €2 million

With PlateSpin, you can replicate a whole server image by streaming it over the network to an available virtual machine host allocated as a warm standby system. In the event of a primary server outage, the standby system can be activated to take over the workload immediately while the production server is restored.

You can also save significant time and money using PlateSpin products for tasks such as hardware lease migration and data center relocation. With PlateSpin, you can automatically stream server workloads over the network for lease migration and hardware upgrades. Network-based physical-to-physical workload streaming eliminates the need to manually reinstall operating systems, patches, data, and applications to new servers, and dramatically shortens downtime. In addition, you can remotely drag-and-drop servers across multi-architecture data centers around the world, and stop flying your IT staff to various locations —saving time, money and resources.

And you'll reduce the costs of server provisioning. By completely automating the process of provisioning and configuring operating systems, data and applications to dissimilar platforms, you can eliminate the manual install process.

If you are managing disaster recovery, server provisioning and data center relocation by hand, you are spending way too much. You can work smarter, not harder, and save a lot of money in the process.

Already in use by nearly half of the Fortune 500, PlateSpin can give you a significant competitive advantage.

Virtual Servers lead to Cost Savings

Virtual machines are easy to deploy and re-deploy. You can provision applications and systems dynamically—moving virtual machines from one server to another as needed.

Physical hardware resources consumed during the day for one workload can automatically be re-purposed during the night for another. In addition, automating manual projects such as server consolidation, end-of-lease hardware migration, and data center site relocation can be a significant way to reduce costs as well. And virtualized disaster recovery provides consolidated protection for workloads without the typical costly requirements for redundant hardware and software.

Data Centers that Adapt to Your Needs

In today's competitive environment, your data center needs to be flexible, adaptable and efficient under pressure, or it will be the weak link in your organization. Novell and PlateSpin can give you a significant competitive advantage, and allow you to meet the emerging needs of your organization—without missing a beat.

Workload optimization balances your physical and virtual infrastructures. It uses ongoing workload monitoring and the automatic consolidation, deconsolidation and free movement of server workloads throughout the network.

You can easily move whole server workloads back and forth between physical and virtual hosts in an automated fashion to ensure workloads are always located where they will run most efficiently.

PlateSpin helped AXA Group move an entire data center from Japan to Australia in record time and at a fraction of the estimated cost.

Automatically create physical or virtual test labs by streaming servers over the network from a production environment. You can replicate production servers to asymmetric environments like blade servers and virtual platforms, without needing to re-install or reload operating systems, data or applications. In fact, PlateSpin PowerConvert is the only product in the world that lets you test the target workload while the source is still online and then sync it back up. You can even create libraries of test images that can be deployed to physical or virtual machines automatically.

Drag and drop new applications back into production and accelerate the round-trip migration of test, development and production systems. Reduce cycle time and eliminate the errors associated with reproducing test and production environments.

And be prepared for the worst with PlateSpin Forge. Forge is a consolidated recovery hardware appliance that protects both physical and virtual server workloads using embedded virtualization technology. In the event of a production server outage or disaster, workloads can be rapidly powered on in the PlateSpin Forge recovery environment and continue to run as normal until the production environment is restored. Now that's flexibility !

Heterogeneous Management

With heterogeneous Virtualization and Workload Lifecycle Management from Novell and PlateSpin, you can provision virtual or physical workloads dynamically and automatically on existing hardware. This lets you adjust to changing resource requirements at peak demand times as well as in test-lab scenarios.

Virtual machine images can be managed and updated (rather than the actual physical servers), which allows effective, non-disruptive testing of patches and updates.

If you need a workload to be on a physical server, we can cover that, too. This lets you balance applications and services in an unified way, instead of on an ad hoc basis. You are better equipped to handle increased temporary or permanent workloads .