Virtualization is here to stay and will be an excellent tool for law firms in the future. According to an article produced by the Gartner Group, we are 2 – 5 years away from mainstream adoption. It is predicted that virtualization will hit about 20% of businesses by the end of 2009, however this number is much smaller when looking at firms with 100 or fewer seats. The legal industry will take even longer since law firms are unique in the diversity of their software mix. Most companies utilize only two or three main applications while law firms, even small ones, may use twenty or more applications and this makes virtualization a much larger challenge in their environment. Therefore the 5-year mark is probably where we will begin to see real value for law firms who want to use this technology.
Server Virtualization
This technology has been around for a relatively long time in technology terms and is generally stable and reliable. The server virtualization king is VMWare with Microsoft having included it in its latest server offering, Windows Server 2008. What this technology does is to allow a single hardware server to host two or more software server “sessions.” Thus, a single piece of hardware can serve as several of your servers. Let’s imagine that your firm currently has three servers, one of which is its main data server, the second is an email server and the third is your accounting server. You could combine these three into a single hardware platform with each having its own server session thus reducing the amount of hardware needed. This sounds attractive since server hardware, on average costs about $3,500.00 per unit, so the apparent savings would be about $7,000.00 in up-front cost. This however does not tell the whole story and there are many other costs to consider.
The argument FOR virtualization is that most servers, properly configured utilize less than 10% of their CPU (the Intel processor at the heart of any computer). This would indicate that there is plenty of CPU time left for a second or even third session. What this ignores is that servers are limited by other factors as much, or perhaps more than the CPU itself. There are four main factors to any computer’s performance.
- CPU Speed and Utilization
- RAM (memory)
- Disk spindles (the number of individual drives or drive arrays)
- Bus Speed (the speed at which the computer speaks to its peripherals internally)
If each server averages about 10% utilization, the usage of a virtualized server would be expected to go up to 30% (in actuality it is probably somewhat less than this), which is a borderline but acceptable figure. The processor in a new server generally has 4 “cores” and you can easily add a second processor at a relatively low price. The factor this ignores is that the utilization is an average. At times a single server‘s CPU utilization may spike up to 40% or more and a computer at this level slows down significantly. Virtualization products, however, are very “smart” and keep this from happening in most instances. So this is not a significant factor and as stated you can always add a second processor. To be safe, for our example we will add a cost of $700.00 for the 2nd processor.
Memory has been and is a big concern for all firms in today’s IT world. The amount of memory you have in your server affects performance far more than the CPU utilization and while virtualization products are smart as stated, you will still need a significant amount of memory in the server to host more than one session. Windows Server 2008, in most cases, can recognize up to 32GB of RAM, while previous versions are limited to 4GB. In our example, let’s imagine that each server will have 16GB for the individual units. We therefore would want to have 16GB available for each virtualized server for a fair comparison. It is important to note here that VMWare is efficient about allocating memory to its sessions so technically the RAM allocations could be smaller, but best practices mean that you would typically follow the model above.
Quality name-brand servers such as HP Proliant models are optimized for virtualization so you can put in blocks of RAM to meet this need. Each block of 16GB will cost about $850.00 so our server needs $1,700.00 more RAM than any individual server we might buy. Our running total now has $2,400.00 in additional costs for our virtualized server.
The big gorilla in the closet however is disk spindles. Server disks run continuously and thus, any slowness in this area is a very large concern. While the CPU’s are very fast and memory is nearly instantaneous, hard disks are physical spinning devices of limited speed. If you add multiple server sessions to a single disk or disk array, the demands on that area of the server go up significantly. This creates two problems. First is simply the performance – which is obvious, but the second issue is the amount of disk space required for three servers. In our example the SQL server will require very little disk space, but both the main data repository and the email database, even in a small firm can be quite large.
To solve these issues, you will need to add an external drive array that allows you to segment drive arrays and an HBA (host bus adapter) for each server session. The number and size of the disks does not change from our individual servers, so we add the external enclosure and HBA’s to our additional cost total. HBA’s cost about $800.00 each at the low end, so that is $2,400 in additional cost. The enclosure itself – again on the lower end, costs about $3,500. Our running total in additional cost is $8,300.00 and we have just exceeded the cost savings of consolidating. If your servers are for MS Exchange and MS SQL as in our current scenario, VMWare actually recommends significantly more horsepower, using high end SAN devices and expensive HBA’s with more throughput than is described above. These server modules are disk intensive and thus need additional measures to support equal performance to simply having disks inside a server.
We also need to add the cost of VMWare; about $1000.00 at the minimum and a reasonable annual maintenance figure to the cost of backup software that supports virtualizations. There are many other small cost items, but for this example, it is clear that virtualized servers are vastly more expensive than individual units.
One of the biggest negatives to virtualization is a hardware failure. If a server goes down in the distributed network, then only that server’s services are lost. If this occurs in a virtualized server, then ALL server sessions provided by that server are down. So in our example above, if the individual SQL server failed, the firm would still have data and mail. If the server were virtualized, all services would be down until the server could be fixed. Most firms that utilize this technology at least consider redundant servers to solve this problem, driving cost up even further.
Clearly virtualization is significantly more expensive up front, but keep in mind that the technical skills required to produce and maintain a virtualized server environment are significantly higher and thus more costly than a standard server environment. If your virtualized system is built by an IT provider, you will be tied to that provider for the lifetime of your system. So why do firms virtualize?
There are many positives to a virtualized environment for larger firms. For example, a server session can easily be moved from one physical server to another. So if a firm has a large number of servers and needs to relieve the load on one server by moving a session to a less busy unit, it can easily be done. More advanced versions of the VMWare software can do failover, so you can also have a second server essentially standing by to take over for a failed server. In some cases there are software products that simply don’t get along with others, so a virtual session can be created to isolate the software so it does not interact with other modules.
There are many other advantages for larger firms, especially with high end internal IT support. If you do not have this, then virtualization means you will have increased reliance on your outside IT vendor, and this of course means increased cost.
Virtualization is outstanding technology and has a great deal of value in specific situations. However it is not a magic bullet or cost savings, but rather a significant technology upgrade that can provide some useful features to firms who invest heavily in their IT solutions.
Desktop Virtualization
This new technology allows a firm to centralize its desktop management. Instead of buying traditional desktops and loading software on each, a virtual desktop lives in a data center and is provided to the user via applications like Citrix XenDesktop. This is similar to using what many clients call a Citrix Server or a Terminal Server except that XenDesktop provides a more feature rich environment for the end user. So a user could have a simple terminal instead of a computer, which costs less and limits the effects of user error.
Most problems on networks arise on the desktop, as adware, spyware, rogue user downloads and other influences cause the user to slow, freeze or have other problems. A virtual desktop cannot be affected by the user and is managed by the IT staff so this eliminates these issues immediately. Further, it allows for updates to take place centrally so that a single “master” virtual desktop can be updated and hit all users simultaneously with new features, software or other enhancements.
This is outstanding technology, but again has a significant cost factor. In a very large installation with one or more robust data centers and a highly trained and effective IT staff, this solution could mean some savings, but more importantly, insures that users have a standardized and bullet proof platform on which to work. The reality, however, is that there are generally lots of exceptions (you have that one partner who insists on having it his way right?) so the effectiveness can be reduced. Nonetheless this is an up and coming, very good solution for very large firms who can afford data centers, significant IT staff and who are able to control the bulk of their users.
Software Virtualization
Software Virtualization is a technology used by a few very large firms. What it does is allow a data center to provide software to a user on the fly. So let’s say that you have an attorney who needs PowerPoint. The firm could, using this technology, provide PowerPoint almost instantly as if it is on his or her desktop already. They could at the same time remove it from another user, thus keeping the license count the same. This gives the firm two efficiencies; instant and consistent deployment of software and license minimization. Both of these are positives but as you can see, on the back end of this, significant technology and an IT staff is required and to make sure all of this works.
Windows Server 2008 has a new feature called TSRemoteAp. This allows you to “publish” an application, which is essentially software virtualization without the impact on the IT department. The setup is relatively easy and it can be quite effective in certain situations even for smaller firms. For example, if a firm has two offices but its Time and Billing system does not have multi-office features, that application could live in the main office, but appear to the satellite office users as if it was installed locally.
Keep in mind that many legacy or specialized applications do not support this type of deployment so only well behaved, up-to-date and major commercial software can be reasonably expected to work in a virtualized environment.
Virtualization in general is outstanding technology and a lot of research and development is going into further improving its uses. For most small to mid-sized firms, the technology just doesn’t quite make sense when a cost-benefit analysis is done. It is proven, however, and can offer advantages in many situations.
When I started in this business 24 years ago, firms were just starting to replace terminals and typewriters with PC’s. Any server they had was the size of a washing machine and did a very specific job. Now as time has passed, the industry has started moving back to that type of solution, but with all the diversity and applications we have available to us today. I’ve also noticed that my son’s haircuts look remarkably like the way I wore my hair in high school. I wonder if hairstyles and technology are related?
No comments:
Post a Comment