Monster savings from virtualization on Sesame Street

By Laurianne McLaughlin

April 7, 2008 12:00 PM ET

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The vendor road less taken

Sesame had been spending approximately $250,000 every three years on hardware and support for its Sun Solaris servers, Broadwater says. The new approach combined 25 virtual machines onto four physical servers within a blade center and reduced that cost to $24,000 every three years, he says. Broadwater's team also consolidated 10 servers, including application, image and log servers onto four physical boxes.

When done with its virtualization effort, the company will reclaim two racks worth of space in its already cramped data center, and reduce power consumption by 15%, Broadwater estimates.

Broadwater's desire to save is not unique: Many IT leaders now tap into the consolidation benefits of virtualization. But his choice of vendor is relatively unusual. Today, the overwhelming majority of enterprise shops use VMware's tools.

Do many enterprise leaders even think of Novell when they're considering virtualization options? "On the technology side, Novell has made significant headway; however, I think they need to up their marketing efforts to further build brand recognition for their virtualization offerings," says Burton Group research analyst Chris Wolf. "That is also crucial in building a strong partner ecosystem." VMware and Citrix have rounded up more partners to date than Novell, to offer complementary products to IT managers.

With Microsoft Corp. entering the virtualization market with its Hyper-V hypervisor (expected to ship in August) and a virtualization management suite, Novell will face even more competition. But that's not a death knell for Novell, Wolf says. "The virtualization market is more than large enough for Novell to carve out its own sizable chunk," Wolf says.

Out with relics, in with open source

So with VMware commanding the enterprise virtualization market, why didn't Broadwater use the leader? "First, obviously, cost," Broadwater says. "VMware has a great solution, it's just very expensive. Second, we're a firm believer in and use a lot of open source. Not just because of cost but because of philosophy. We actually work on open-source projects and give code back." Broadwater has been using open-source tools such as the Apache Web server software for years.

Reprinted with permission from

This story is reprinted from CIO.com, an online resource for information executives.
Story Copyright CXO Media Inc., 2009. All rights reserved.

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