Virtualization Gets Real

When it comes to quantifiable business benefits, there’s nothing “virtual” about a virtualized IT infrastructure. The payback is real—just ask Bob Neuberger, the Server, Storage and Database Manager for National Semiconductor. Santa Clara, Calif.-based National is the industry’s leading manufacturer of high-performance analog devices and subsystems, reporting sales of $1.91 billion in its most recent fiscal year. Like many firms, National experienced years of growth in the demand for Windows-based business applications. To provide the isolation necessary to run these programs reliably, National followed the common practice of deploying each on a dedicated server. Eventually the number of Windows-based servers and the cost of maintaining them became overwhelming— and most were very significantly underutilized.
“We had this beautiful farm of Dell PowerEdge servers,” recalls Neuberger, “but many were only running at 5 percent of capacity.” Neuberger and his team chose an optimization strategy—based on Dell servers and VMware virtual infrastructure— that allowed them to consolidate up to eight physical servers as virtual machines running on a single Dell server.
“Our goal was to implement VMware software without purchasing any additional servers,” Neuberger says. “We’ve easily accomplished that, despite continually implementing new Windows applications to support our internal customers.”