Seabreeze: A Case Study

As has been previously stated, adding virtualization offers several advantages for the Seabreeze physical server network. Some advantages of virtualization are:

reduced capital (hardware) and operating costs;
better resource management;
improved security.

To begin with, virtualization reduces hardware costs by reducing consolidating equipment. Initially, Seabreeze will reduce the physical server infrastructure by 70%. The project will upgrade the data center to 21 energy efficient servers with enough resources (CPUs, networking, memory, and disk storage) to host the virtual infrastructure. As for storage, the VMs will be stored on a storage area network (SAN). That is to say, the server cluster will be connected to a petabyte SAN for data

storage; one hundred terabytes will be for the VM images and 900 terabytes will house the data storage. In addition to reducing the number of physical servers, Seabreeze can buy the least expensive hardware since virtualization solutions are vendor neutral.

Next, virtualization allows better management of resources. For instance, fewer servers also require less rackspace; furthermore, the server farm can be relocated to a smaller location that is better suited for the data center. Also, reducing the physical servers by 51 servers subsequently cuts down the amount of power required to run the data center. And virtualization allows multiple operating systems to on the same hardware/servers. In other words, multiple virtual servers can share resources by running on the same hardware.

As a final point, virtualization indirectly improves security. Although virtualization is not necessarily a security solution in this case, it has some characteristics that could make the network more secure. For instance, applications are segmented when they are configured in different VMs. In fact, virtualization makes it simple to run all services on a dedicated VM image. Further, virtualization makes disaster recovery simple since all that is involved is restarting the image from a known good snapshot. And naturally, virtualization improves recovery time and virtualization adds high availability for services.

To summarize, virtualization will bring several benefits to Seabreeze. Specifically, virtualization will be reducing expenditures, improve resource management in the data center, and increase server security. However, in addition to gaining these advantages of virtualization, there will be some challenges of adopting virtualization that must be addressed.