The systems team, which manages and maintains the University’s central servers and storage, is saving money, energy and space by leveraging the benefits of blade server and server virtualization technology.

Blade servers are modularized, high-density server systems engineered to maximize space and power utilization while providing a powerful, redundant computing platform. IT uses a Dell PowerEdge 1955 Blade system, providing a stable, efficient set of servers for a variety of applications and services. With this system, each blade server uses 40% less energy than an equivalent rack-mountable server.

Server virtualization is a technology that allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently on the same physical server. Virtualization provides a mechanism for sharing the resources of the server (memory, CPU, hard disk, network) between multiple “guest” operating systems. Such technology optimizes the use of the underlying hardware and decreases the frequency of which new hardware is brought into VU’s server room. Having less equipment means less energy required both to power and cool the server room. We currently use VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure product which has proven stable and fast. Using VMware’s product, we have been able to host 32 operating system installations on 4 of the Dell 1955 blades. That’s 28 fewer physical servers than what would be required without server virtualization technology. 

Because of the energy savings as well as the reduced cost of management, IT plans to continue expanding the use of both blade servers and virtualization technologies in the future.