Real cash win by Virtualizing Virtual Infrastructure 3!

I really don't need to shout anymore. We are starting up a discussion group and I am beginning to feel that people are REALLY BEGINNING TO GET THE POINT!

No kidding. News like this about NationWide Inc. happening around you tells you enough. What it does tell us all is to:

• Stop fooling around
• Stop fooling yourself
• Start listening to your tech and non-tech staff
• Start discussions and get everyone's valuable opinions
• Start encouraging silent liars* to become honest protestors
• Time is running out
• And so is your cash

On a international internship program at our University that I am supervising (where I am assisting in my role as a project manager/Supervisor, call it whatever you wanna call it), I can see that the difficult path towards the TCO/TCA is getting easier. Once we have a grip on our TCO we can surely bring down that number drastically (I'm hoping to present the case to reduce that amount by 40%). 40% or maybe even more, you know what that means. A lot!!!

Look at Nationwide Inc's story.

"People asked 'why go virtual?'. We reviewed the processes, the stability, and made sure that it made sense to put it in the environment. We went through the board from technical and financial standpoint -- there had to be a cost benefit. Our TCO study found $500,000 savings from the capital budget, plus savings on opex such as power, cooling and data centre space."

The company estimates that it saved $2,250 per machine, and experienced an increase in utilization figures from 10-15 per cent to 60-70 per cent. Other savings include the ability to provision a server in hours rather than weeks, the elimination of downtime for hardware upgrades or maintenance and server admins having to work fewer hours.

That quoted text above can be seen by a smart manager. You just can't miss it. Sure the road is hard but remember this real goooood. Its better to be on a hard track today than nowhere tomorrow.

Your tired and exhausted sysadmins could turn into Elmer Fudd in the rabbit farm, trigger happy whooping ass of the server influx! And your CIO would not be the only guy to be happy. The whole Board of directors is gonna be thrilled. And the world class software is getting cheaper.

Prices for the base ESX Server product have been cut from $5,000 (£2,700) per two CPUs to $1,000 (£540) for the VI Starter Edition, which includes the VirtualCenter that was previously sold separately. VI Standard Edition adds support for SAN-based storage and for VMs that use symmetric multi-processing, at a cost of $3,750 (£2,030), while VI Enterprise Edition is priced at $5,750, (£3,110) and adds DRS, HA and Consolidated Backup to the other products’ features.

What else are you waiting for?

* We will talk more about decision making process and where our silent liars fit it (not really)...