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Feature: Migration
Virtualization goes Nationwide
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CommentsLast year, Nationwide's chief architect Guru Vasudeva tested Nationwide's Unix and Windows servers and found that they were only using about 10% of the available CPU capacity. Multiple hundreds of servers meant high maintenance costs and lots of floor space that was being wasted. Adding to the problem was Vasudeva's expectation that with Web site upgrades and growing internal business processes, he'd need another 400-500 servers by the end of 2006.
Vasudeva started looking for a way to cut costs and make more efficient use of the available CPUs. He discovered that virtualization could help Nationwide reduce the "server sprawl" it was experiencing, and also increase CPU efficiency while saving money.
Nationwide considered using Solaris on Sun hardware, but found that by using SUSE Linux to run the virtual servers, it could save even more money on licensing and hardware. But Vasudeva had to be sure they wouldn't be taking on an inordinate amount of risk by using open source software.
"How do we take advantage of the open source movement?" Vasudeva says. "We felt that some of the tools coming out would benefit us. And increasingly, it would be impossible to avoid open source. But we wanted to see what we could do to manage the risk." Vasudeva undertook studies to evaluate the possible legal, support, and technical risks of using Linux. "When we compared the economical benefit to the risk, we said we should go ahead and use Linux," he says. "[It's] an easy one because most of the legal and support risks are taken out of the picture."
With the new system, Vasudeva put 400 CPUs on two IBM System z900 servers, a consolidation that is projected to save Nationwide about $15 million over the next three years. And instead of buying hundreds of new servers to handle anticipated growth, Vasudeva is simply virtualizing them, with a plan to continue the process as older physical servers are due for replacement.
With several mission-critical financial applications that only run on Windows, Vasudeva isn't going completely open source anytime soon. "We need to figure out how to contain that server space," he says, "so we've looked at VMware as a way to virtualize [them]."
Vasudeva advises other IT managers to look closely at risks before adopting open source software. "Define and establish a risk management framework," he says. "Establish an initial proof-of-concept that demonstrates mission-critical applications can run on this technology, and then start moving them. Don't buy into the myth that Unix admins cannot be easily trained to become Linux admins. We have found it takes hardly any time."
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on Virtualization goes NationwideNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
Is this because you (Tina) didn't really ask the right questions or is there another reason?
Mainframe systems come with an integrity guarantee. If the system can be hacked, or otherwise broken into, IBM is on the line as well. This is part of the standard mainframe offering, not an extra charge or services offering etc. There is no reason why a CIO would not, assuming he knew what levels of hardware and software and having seen Guru speak, I bet he does.
Back in the late 1990's I architected an Internet banking system for NatWest Bank in the UK that hosted two IBM mainframes outside their corporate firewall, running as a parallel Sysplex. The system was designed to scale from 3k to 1.5million users without outage, and the largest number of users registered was 995,000 and while we did take down the servers one at a time, never took down planned or unplanned both.
Not only did we talk about it publically, but you could go to <a href="http://www.netcraft.com/" title="netcraft.com">http://www.netcraft.com/</a netcraft.com> and it would tell you what software was running... OS/390 V2. Netcraft shows just Linux and IBM HTTP Server for Nationwide. <a href="http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.nationwide.com" title="netcraft.com">http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:<nobr>/<wbr></nobr> /www.nationwide.com</a netcraft.com>
The NatWest system is no longer running on mainframes and was migrated to the typical run of the mill Intel server farm following NatWest being acquired.
The first time IBM tried it they passed 4,000 vms on an s/390, and typical installations go well over 1,000 vms per box. Check out:
<a href="http://linuxfocus.org/English/March2004/article328.shtml" title="linuxfocus.org">http://linuxfocus.org/English/March2004/article32<nobr>8<wbr></nobr> .shtml</a linuxfocus.org>
for details.
Here are the basic requirements:
The Requirements for running Linux on the S/390
* 9672 G5/G6, Multirise 3000 or z/Series 800, 900, 990 IBM Processor
* 64Mb+ Memory (very minimum - distributions and applications dependent)
* 500 Cyl + Disk space ( Model 3390 - small minimum system)
* IBM Network Device Support (one required) Ethe
* rnet, Token Ring, Fast Ethernet, ESCON, OSA or HiperSocket. There are more devices to support.
* Before Linux can use a device the associated driver for zSeries and S/390 device must be available to the kernel.
* There are kernel resident drivers and external drivers for S/390 and zSeries devices.
* External drivers are modules loaded on request with their parameters by means of commands.
* Resident drivers receive their parameters at boot time, from a kernel parameter line, held in a file.
===
GreyGeek
As far as the article you mentioned, "mom and pop shops" as you put it. I think it is a great article that shows some proof that it doesn't take a multi-billion dollar company to successfully use open source software to start up or run a business. The company I work for doesn't make billions but its not a mom and pop either. I have my success stories and I have had my pitfalls with Linux as well as Windows. There are lots of people out there who have some ideas but don't know where to get started. The article helps spark ideas and thought.
I guess it would be easier to bash someone for their efforts as an editor on an article that doesn't suite you. I would also suppose you sit down with the news paper and read every article and bash all the articles that have no interest to you. Most people just skip them. I personally skip to the funnies first. Just my two cents.
Are you slightly obtuse? Have Hollywood stars large mansions and expensive cars? Yes, even you know that. Have large corporations or public offices of 30000 employees large computer systems? Do they have security systems? Would intelligent criminals expect top notch security management and competent network and system administrators at such places? Can they be broken by intelligent criminals? Your comment is an insult - have you ever heard of a car thief having to be told where your car is or needing a key to nick it?
What about the risks of closed source software?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 11, 2007 06:38 AMRe:What about the risks of closed source software?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 12, 2007 01:09 PMThe risk is in moving from a model to which your business has adapted to another that may be less, or differently, suitable in some respects.
Any change on this scale - regardless of the "from" or the "to" - needs to be risk managed. Any CIO who doesnt is a cowboy or just plain stupid.
One has to wonder if some people have ever had responsibility for anything more involved than a three-legged race at the county fair.
Excellent - Almost
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 09, 2007 05:36 AMUnfortunately the article lacks technical detail and possibly accuracy. For instance "400 CPUs on two IBM System z900 servers" should surely have specified that these were virtual CPUs, as the largest z900 I've ever heard of only supports 16 processors. None the less, 200 virtual machines per box is awesome, even if the box is IBM big iron.
Since Tina mentioned SuSE, I must assume that they are using Novell's SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 10 with its Xen virtualization component. But, The story doesn't provide much specific information about the guest OSes. Are we to assume that Nationwide is running 400 virtual instances of Linux? That was my first impression, but later in the article it talks about using VMWare to virtualize Windows. This seems unnecessary if they are already using Xen but, who knows what they are doing. The article lacks information and clarity.
I'd very much like to see this story expanded with greater detail and accuracy.
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