Reducing Total Cost of Ownership?
Virtualization? What The Heck Is That? - Chapter 03
This has to be one of the most loaded questions in computing today. Why is cost of ownership an issue? Why is it now driving all kinds of revisions in the industry? Well, global warming, increasing cost of cooling systems, and other environmental factors aside, processors that are insane, like we need more cores? Not to mention real estate and physical infrastructure costs, both network and storage connectivity expense, and the list goes on, it all boils down to one issue, which is core, bad pun intented, to virtualization, and one we have already discussed in this blog… effective and efficient utilization of resources.
Virtualization uses resources that are not already used in an efficacious way. Why does this situation exist? Blame developers, yes developers, and blame the management of the developer groups even more. Everyone is in a rush to market, such that we the customer get nothing but junk.
Virtualization, rather, virtual instances isolate bad code, and protect other virtual instances from each other. This is true. But why? Because if good code dominated the computing industry, co-hosting would have killed virtualization, hands down! In fact, it may yet do it at some point in the future.
Now, just about everyone reading this article is saying… What is this bozo talking about this time? I expected to read about reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), not hear yet another tirade on developer coding issues. Can we please get back to the title? Well, I will answer that question… in short actually I have been on topic the entire time. Good code does the following:
- Saves money by saving developer lines of code generation cycles
- Gets products to market faster with shorter alpha, beta, and release candidate cycles
- Provides for happier customers
- Allows for more extensive leverage of Co-Hosting
- Reduces total ownership cost across the support infrastructure, with fewer customers griping?
Of course, virtualization does a few things that co-hosting does not do including:
- Encapsulation of virtual instances, easy to migrate, easier to backup and recover
- As noted above isolates virtual instances from other virtual instances to the greatest extent possible
- Customers think they are isolated, and so have better performance… bhah!
However, virtualization does incur expenses identical to traditional hardware, and aggravates a few issues, for example:
- Virtual instances do not reduce software costs, application and operating system licensing is still incurred, whereas co-hosting reduces application and operating system expense
- Virtualization only in part, offsets or avoids some of the infrastructure cost compare to traditional hardware
- Virtualization generates a completely new expense, the cost of the virtualization software licensing expense, this is not insignificant
- Reduces infrastructure cost, reducing network and storage connectivity costs in total
- Virtualization has a cost in common with co-hosting, that management tends to discount, or worse ignore, the eggs-all-in-one-basket issue of course! Lose one virtual host, and lose of all virtual instances.
The strengths of virtualization can be trumped by co-hosting, on two keys issues, application/operating system expense, and virtualization software platform cost. For example, three of the most obvious co-hosting models, just happen to be very common solutions in computing today:
- Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)
- Citrix Application Server
- Microsoft SQL Server (SQL)
These same environments are designed to be co-hosting oriented and down right blow gigabyte chunks when they are embedded in virtual instances compared to straight co-hosting. For those keeping score, yes, yes, virtualization saves money, if it is done right, but if co-hosting is done right, it should save more. All that is needed is good code. So, we have come full circle, yes? If we had good code, we could do better or more co-hosting. Taking it a logical step further, designing better code, so co-hosting is not even needed? What a radical concept! And, well, we then would not need virtualization at all either!
Add comment August 22nd, 2007
