For years, moving big, mission-critical workloads into a virtualized environment has been deemed a mission impossible.
According to conventional wisdom, virtualized systems simply weren’t big enough or reliable enough to justify the move. But that’s not the case anymore.
With the release of Superdome X, HPE’s largest Intel-based server appliance to date, the “big” barrier to virtualization is gone. HPE recently disproved the notion that there were limits to what virtualization could do by combining it with VMware’s virtualization software and an all-flash storage system. The results were, in a word, big: 90% better performance for mission-critical workloads, 99.9999% availability to meet even the most stringent SLAs and near-liner scalability.
Yet for all the big numbers behind the effort, the most impressive number may be the smallest: one hour. That’s how long it took to set up a virtualized storage/server system with 240 cores and a performance rate of 50,000 IOPs.
The Superdome X results are a game changer in that it transforms the way that businesses see their options for mission-critical workloads. Until now, the argument against virtualization has been a closed one. We can’t risk it. It can’t handle it. It’ll cost a lot for very little return.
Those doubts are now dispersed. You can virtualize any workload, no matter how important. You can deliver six nines of availability and reliability in a virtual environment. And you can save a lot of money in the process by moving from your current mission-critical UNIX environment to physical or virtual Windows or Linux, using Superdome X’s unique hard partitioning architecture to reduce database licensing costs.
That last point may come as a surprise to many. Enterprises typically look at mission-critical applications in massive databases or ERP systems as a fixed and necessary cost. It may be expensive, they rationalize, but it’s the heart of our business and if the heart fails, everything fails.
The good news is that moving mission-critical applications to a virtual environment doesn’t need to be as complicated as heart transplant surgery. For one thing, the database doesn’t need to change. If you’re running Oracle or SAP or SQL Server, you can keep running them in a virtualized environment and spend less on licensing too. And you’re still using the same x86-based processors, but in a far more reliable, scalable platform with the Superdome X; up to 240 cores and 24 TB of memory.
Of course, migrating mission-critical applications onto a new platform is never to be taken lightly. We recommend that enterprises fully evaluate the migration before the move:
- How much of a performance improvement can we expect?
- How will the move impact security and compliance requirements?
- What kind of savings can we expect?
- Do we have the Linux skills in house or do we need to engage with a managed services partner?
As a leading HPE partner, Rolta AdvizeX can help you answer those questions through one of our detailed Advizer engagements. Over the years, we’ve developed an extensive library of best practices for virtual data center deployments that can help you avoid both common and not-so-common pitfalls on the path to virtualization. ▪