How to save in the mid-market with virtualization

Need to update your datacenter when your midmarket IT organization’s budget is squeezed tight? Kane County, the fourth-largest county in Illinois and one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States, suffered those two problems while still stuck with a Y2K hangover that left it littered with some 300 separate servers supporting every department and every application.

When CTO David Siles took the job in 2003, he got a mandate: Ditch the existing mainframe environment and drag the county to the leading edge of technology, but do it all with a pinched budget-now at $4.6 million yearly to support a population of 480,000 citizens and 1,450 county employees.

Virtualized desktops, virtual servers and a SAN proved key to his budget-minded plan. CIO first talked to Siles about his virtualization lessons learned in 2007; since then, he’s reaped even more savings.

Virtual desktop makeover

The first thing Kane County tackled was desktop virtualization, in 2005, to solve a problem with a state welfare application used to manage programs for infants and children. It’s a key application: All food stamps have to be administered through it for anybody in the county’s welfare system.

Siles says he and his staff wouldn’t have picked this legacy software themselves, given its old 16-bit architecture. But “that happens in government,” he says, just as it does in the private sector: Instead of getting the most up-to-date technology, IT staff sometimes has to shoehorn legacy programs into updated infrastructures. This is particularly true for IT leaders in midsize organizations, like Kane County.

The application was running on legacy Novell infrastructure and using an outmoded protocol; specifically, the application used the IPX protocol, but the county had upgraded to switches and routers that no longer passed the protocol.

Kane County IT put the application into Citrix as instructed by the state, Siles says, but it just kept crashing.

Siles and his staff turned to VMware’s VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) technology to see if that would solve the problem. Siles and his group decided to host the server, using VMware’s ESX 3.0. VDI worked so well that it became a platform that the county has progressively pushed out to other uses, Siles says.

Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT who’s familiar with the deployment, says Kane County is a “classic example” of what an established mid-market-sized organization with obvious technological credentials and background-these guys were running a mainframe, after all-does when it takes the jump into next-generation technology.

“For enterprises with long histories of dependence on mainframe systems for high-end transaction processes, you have to stick to a mainframe. But for an organization [like Kane County] that embraced the mainframe some years ago but then found it didn’t need that level of performance today, going to a standard level like Dell servers and [EqualLogic’s iSCSI SAN, which Kane County deployed for its storage arrays] can provide all the performance you need at a fraction of the cost, and with plenty of young IT administrators and management staff available for a long time to come,” he says.

At this point, Kane County is supporting some 650 virtual desktops. Some critics say it costs as much to buy thin-client equipment as it does to buy a desktop PC, so it’s pointless to give up processing power for a dumb device that just delivers screen scrapes. Siles agrees that it’s roughly the same cost to put the thin client at the edge initially, but where Kane County is making up the money, he says, is twofold: First, in desktop lifecycle, which has doubled, and second, through reduced management costs.

Today, the client refresh lifecycle has changed from four years for desktops to eight years for thin clients, thus cutting the hardware capital costs in half, Siles says. Per-user hardware costs are now less than $300 per thin client, a 70 percent savings compared to fully provisioned desktops, Siles says. The county currently has a 70/30 split between thin clients and traditional desktop PCs, he adds.

One important point for companies to bear in mind when deploying virtualized desktops: Find out from the users themselves where physical desktops need to stay, Siles advises.

For example, his staff grilled a pilot group of 50 users and found that employees who deal with heavy graphical applications made a good argument for keeping their physical desktops.

In a related virtual desktops benefit, supporting far-flung users across the large county has also gotten much easier and much cheaper, Siles says. Kane County employees are in 45 offices in 16 cities throughout the county. It was common for IT staff to rack up 2 hours of drive time before they could even begin to tackle a support problem. For trouble tickets involving hardware failure, Siles says, those long trips were duplicated after the parts came in. Such long trips are pretty much a thing of the past since virtualizing the desktops, he says.

VDI is also helping with patch and upgrade management, including for mobile police units that used to take three months to upgrade, he says.

A smaller datacenter

Since the desktop virtualization rollout, Kane County has pushed on to server virtualization and is reaping large power savings as a result, Siles says.

When Siles arrived in 2003, the IT environment had more than 300 servers.

“It was a direct fallout of Y2K,” he says. “In 1999 the county authorized everybody to buy whatever they needed to solve the Y2K problem. It was way overkill.”

Siles and his group decided a consolidation effort was in order. He had worked with VMware technology previously, believed it was a way to save money while updating, and sold the board and the CIO on going the virtualization route.

The next step was to see a reference customer who had experienced a similar deployment.

There wasn’t one. That might have been a problem for the timid, but Kane County saved some $800,000 when it agreed to become a reference customer.

“We’re on the leading edge in government,” Siles says. “Nobody in government wants to be there. Usually it’s a good way to start your career over-somewhere else.”

Today, the current physical server count is 48. Heating and cooling needs have decreased dramatically as the county moved down from a 2,400-square-foot datacenter to the current one of 550 square feet with a secondary datacenter at 400 square feet.

Other virtualization lessons learned What are Siles’ other lessons learned from the deployment for midsize IT leaders? First, get a deep understanding of your end-users’ environment, he says, before getting involved in a virtualization deployment. “The big thing people make a mistake with: they don’t understand their environment before they start. They buy, they throw it in, and they don’t get the results they’re looking for.”

Particularly when you’re a smaller company dealing with a tight budget, it’s crucial to spend time benchmarking the environment to make sure virtualization is sized right, he says. “You don’t want to virtualize high-value targets and have users come back and say performance has gone through the floor,” he says.

Another lesson learned: you may need to spend related money upfront in order to reap virtualization savings. Kane County spent it on network infrastructure robust enough to run a VMware environment. “I knew that your network can kill you if you don’t do it right,” Siles says. “Especially when you’re doing iSCSI storage.”

A final bonus of virtualization for Kane County has been a boost in security, Siles says. The virtualized servers are keeping sensitive data in-house and off of client machines-thus out of “lost laptop” headlines-and helping ensure compliance with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), he says.

Not only that, but the chance of an employee cutting welfare checks fraudulently is gone, Siles says. “Now we have audit controls over who gets in, or we can kill access to IP over the weekend or after hours.”