London School of Economics Automates Virtualized Infrastructure Management
The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has automated control of its virtualized IT infrastructure to help ensure its resources are used as efficiently as possible. The London-based specialist university has implemented VMTurbo Operations Manager, an intelligent workload management solution for cloud and virtualized environments.
With an increasing number of virtualized servers in its environment, LSE found that its existing management tools didn't have the intelligence required to make sure its applications had access to the appropriate resources. Administrators made the decision to switch to VMTurbo Operations Manager to optimize the school's resource allocation and meet its service level agreements.
LSE services all departmental IT requirements through a single, consolidated data center. It uses HP blade servers as hosts along with HP EVA and MSA storage. More than 80 percent of its environment runs on the VMware vSphere virtualization platform, with three clusters, 20 physical hosts, 564 virtual machines, and roughly 38 terabytes of storage.
VMTurbo Operations Manager uses a patent-pending Economic Scheduling Engine, which automates operational procedures of virtualization management, including workload balancing, real-time and continuous rightsizing, and virtual infrastructure performance and capacity management, according to information on the company's site.
"VMTurbo Operations Manager has given us the ability to better dictate how infrastructure resources are allocated to applications and workloads managed by our application and web teams," said Danny Simpson, systems specialist for IT services at LSE, in a prepared statement. "The market-based approach utilized in their analytic model automates the decision-making process across our virtual environment and has dramatically improved our ability to ensure performance, increase utilization, and reduce operating costs."
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a specialized research and teaching university based in London, England. It serves more than 9,000 undergraduate and students and offers programs in economics, politics, law, sociology, anthropology, accounting, finance, and other social sciences.
Further information about VMTurbo Operations Manager is available at vmturbo.com.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].