Consolidation and Virtualization of Servers

Project and Program: Linux & VM, Virtualization

Tags: Proceedings, SHARE in Boston 2013, 2013

The fast growth of credit unions allied to the dynamic financial Brazilian market and innovative nature of Sicoob, demanded a massive investment in equipment and on its infrastructure. All, in order to allow in a short period of time, even more available processing power. But on the other hand, requiring a huge amount of power consumption and generating a considerable amount of obsolete equipment, which required a proper destination.  Given this situation was opposed to the IT Strategic Planning of Sicoob, a decision was made to create the Server Virtualization and Consolidation Project, that was motivated by three main goals: reduce costs, achieve a flexible architecture and contribute to the environmental issue. This movement was based on the replacement of blade servers to business enterprise servers, middle-range servers and mainframes, as well as the consolidation and virtualization of critical business systems (Core Banking). Not only that, there was also a creation of a new structure using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), on top of both Mainframe (z/VM) platform, as well as the rest of the systems located in the distributed environment, through the use of the VMware platform. In order to achieve a reduction in costs of software licensing, a decision was made in favor of the adoption of the Open Source Linux operating system, being chosen the SUSE Linux, which has distributions for mainframe environments, as well as distributed systems environments. Thus, it was possible to adjust the company values with the business growth needs, gaining an appropriate level of sustainability before the expansion of the cooperative system. The project was considered successful, for it was able to reverse the trend of the ongoing growth of the computational park, where there was a waste of available resources, generating inefficiencies with the use of human, computer and electrical resources. This way, redirecting the growth based on the principles of efficiency, agility, business expansion and environmental responsibility. With the completion of these changes, it was possible to achieve economic, technical and environmental sustainability benefits. The implemented infrastructure architecture, based on Linux and zLinux servers, virtualized on VMware and z/VM platforms respectively, combined with modular application architecture, object-oriented, supported by the technologies: JAVA, Websphere and JBoss. All this allowed the Sicoob Confederation reach the flexibility needed to support its business needs. That is because this architecture allows applications and components to be executed in both large scale (Mainframe) as well as on the distributed environment (Intel). This flexibility also provides many other benefits, such as the increase of the environment availability, once that any of the environments could become unavailable; either because of a scheduled maintenance or due to hardware problems, without generating unavailability to the business. Another befit obtained was scalability, because both environments can grow vertically (scale-up), with the increase of memory and processing, as well as horizontally (scale-out), with the increase in the number of virtual machines at any of the platforms. Lastly, there was also a considerable increase on security level, with the use of the two environments. If there is a necessity of applying a critical security fix in any of the environments, this fix can be tested and applied rapidly, for the other environment has the ability to withstand the required load. For the realization of this project: 300 physical servers were replaced, being 210 blade-type servers and 90 chassis-type server (with over 5 years of use) that were consolidated into 4 enterprise-scale servers, 17 middle-range servers and 3 mainframes. This new environment has the capacity of supporting even the growing demand of 340% in the number virtual servers due to the growth of operational volume in the period between 2007 and 2012. If the strategic redirection had not been performed, the projection of the environment for 2012 pointed to a necessity of a significant increase of physical servers’ necessary to support the demands and business needs. In this study, it can be concluded that it would be necessary 1,134 blades and 34 middle-range servers, including the legacy, to accommodate the anticipated growth. In this scenario, without the initiatives to consolidate and virtualize, the projection for 12 months would result in expenditures at the order of R$ 13,552,000.00 only with licensing, R$ 2,500,000.00 with labor for administering and managing the computational park, R$ 4,850,000.00 with electric consumption, plus an additional cost of R$ 8,200,000.00 with network equipment and SAN connections, totaling an annual expenditure of R$ 29,102,000.00. On the other hand, with the virtualization and consolidation of the servers, it was possible achieve a significant cost reduction, because there was a spending of R$ 9,650,000.00 with licensing, R$ 1,250,000.00 spent with labor for the administration and management of the computational park and R$ 930,000.00 with electric consumption and there were no additional spending with network equipment and connections. All this totalizing an annual spending of: R$ 11,830,000.00, which made possible an economy of R$ 17,272,000.00. The reduction in the amount of hardware necessary to process the actual transactional volume, allowed a reduction in the amount of obsolete equipment that would need a proper destination due to its toxic components. The consolidation and virtualization of the blade-type servers, avoided a disposal of approximately 5 tons of electronic waste in the environment, and an increase in electricity consumption of approximately 460%. This reduction prevented a consumption of 6,134,400 KW/year of energy and an emission of 270 tons of CO2/year. Comparatively, this electrical consumption is equivalent to an annual consumption of 273 homes or the amount of CO2 emissions produced by 80 cars. Ultimately, the studies generated by the IT area concluded that, in case the virtualization and consolidation of servers’ hadn´t occurred, the power consumption projected for 2012 would be 927 KW/h higher than the current scenario. Furthermore, it would require a 331% increase in the amount of hardware needed to process the existing transactional volume and not considering the vegetative growing of critical systems. Marcos Vinícius dos Santos Feitosa SICOOB – Sistema de Cooperativas de Crédito do Brasil

Marcos Vinícius dos Santos Feitosa , SICOOB – Sistema de Cooperativas de Crédito do Brasil

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