Computing future needs
As Lee’s Summit, Mo.’s population has grown, so has the city’s technology infrastructure. To meet the computing demands of the city’s more than 500 employees, the Information Technology Services (ITS) staff is moving its databases and other applications from traditional servers to virtual servers. The new equipment occupies less space and generates less heat than the previous equipment, and simplifies server maintenance.
Lee’s Summit is one of the fastest growing cities in the Midwest with a population increase of nearly 17 percent from 2000 to 2004. By spring 2004, Randy Dickey, chief technology officer, was searching for a way to handle the rapidly increasing data demands of the city’s employees. The city had built a traditional server-based environment, in which one server was dedicated to each application or a handful of applications. Additional applications demanded more hardware, and more time for ensuring security and managing software versions and patches.
With more than 40 servers, even cooling the server room in City Hall was becoming a problem for the ITS Department. Ideally, the room, which had its own air conditioning system, would have been kept under 70 degrees, but because it housed so many servers, the IT staff had trouble cooling it below 80 degrees. If the equipment overheated, it would shut down automatically, and data could be lost.
After months of research and testing, Dickey decided to move the city’s critical business systems, such as e-mail and code administration databases, to an integrated virtual server/storage area network (SAN) environment. The new system replaced the city’s servers with six much smaller computers that would function as multiple physical servers on a single set of hardware. Each four- to eight-inch tall box can host 10 to 20 virtual servers. The city purchased SAN hardware (a Clariion CX300 array) from Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC and installed the company’s VMWare software to host the new virtual machines. The city contracted with Lenexa, Kan.-based Alexander Open Systems to plan and set up the new equipment. In just a few weeks, more than 27 servers were residing on the SAN, and the city now has the equivalent of 55 servers operating on the new equipment.
Network Manager Kevin Davidson estimates that server down time and repair time has been reduced by more than 80 percent. Rebuilding a server, once parts arrived, used to take up to a full day, whereas rebuilding a downed virtual server can take less than an hour. (The entire server is backed up by a file in an off-site location that can be booted up from the remote site.)
Soon after the equipment was installed, one of the application managers discovered that a new application was conflicting with another one on the same server. Instead of purchasing a new server, Davidson created a virtual server in minutes, and the application problems were solved.
The ITS staff monitor the servers’ activities using the VMWare Virtual Center software, which tracks the resources of the host servers and each individual virtual server. If the servers exceed pre-defined thresholds, the software alerts the ITS staff, allowing them to foresee and avoid disasters rather than struggle to rapidly recover and rebuild failed servers.
With the SAN now in place at Lee’s Summit, the ITS staff no longer has problems cooling the server room. Davidson also has found that the virtual machine on the SAN runs the network at a higher speed than the old servers. The city plans to have 90 percent of its systems running on virtual servers by the end of 2006.
Dennis All, information support specialist and trainer, Lee’s Summit, Mo.