Virtualization

UPenn To Manage Virtualization with Virtual Iron Software

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/06/09

The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has gone public with deployment of virtualization software from Virtual Iron Software. Virtualization enables IT administrators to streamline the IT infrastructure by running multiple applications and operating systems on a single server.

"Our team needed to control IT infrastructure expenses while ensuring key applications remained available and effective for our user base of human resources employees," said Chris Blickley, manager of IT for UPenn human resources. "With Virtual Iron we have been able to consolidate servers to not only save money on physical space, but also provide better system responsiveness and uptime. We are currently projecting a 37 percent savings on maintenance and upgrade costs alone."

The Virtual Iron software includes three components:

• The VI Center provides a means to control and automate virtual resources from a central location;
• Virtualization Servers are deployed on bare-metal, industry-standard servers to streamline data center management; and
• Open Source Virtualization, based on an open source hypervisor, loads when the physical server boots; it manages hardware resources and leverages hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities built into Intel and AMD processors.

Jefferson Davis Community College in Brewton, AL also recently virtualized some of its servers. By implementing Virtual Iron, Anthony Hardy, director of technology and IS, was able to streamline support for the server environment and increase usage at one third the cost of comparable offerings. The school runs both Microsoft and open source applications.