We were around before summer writing about the art of managing datacenters as a business on its own, even if conducted inside Objectway. Today I will show you because excellence in datacenter managing means doing – constantly and increasingly – more with less.

Virtual is Quite Material

Years ago the world of datacenter has taken an important turn through its evolutionary path: the way towards virtualization, i.e. separate the client needs from the physical environment that answers them. More and more, the whole of hardware and software inside the datacenter is hidden to the client; a cloud inside which resource he’s asking for are dynamically allocate when opportunity arises, or not if they are not needed at that moment.

Before virtualization, the client had machines or partial machines statically assigned to it, no matter how and when they were grinding or being idle. And the footprint, as the costs, were static as well: a physical server always fills the same volume either turned on, or off. Doing more with less, at this extent, means tuning the virtualized infrastructure so that, for example, you can start from a traditional architecture with seven servers plus seven other servers for redundancy, and end with a couple of cabinets that provide the same services in half the forme physical space, that is, the requested space for managing the virtual machines necessary for the task.

Virtual machines reduce also the environmental footprint, also. Doing more with less is about costs too, and to consume less energy, because of using less servers and physical devices, translate in more efficiency and a better bottom line.

Steadiness Is Good, Repetition Is Not

Life inside a datacenter is indeed interesting if you like that kind of job (and we like it), albeit monotonous. Through virtualization we reduce costs, footprints, energy consumption and monotony by reducing the need for intervention. In the old days, with traditional servers, you had to install the same given piece of software on every machine, and maintain and support it the same way. Virtualization allows to create the best virtual machine for every task and then replicate it at will, so asking for just one configuration instead of several ones.

This is what doing more with less means every day inside a datacenter. It’s a continuous work of improvement that pushes the resources of the datacenter at their limit, by constantly taking actions to reduce and optimize them. It’s also a very interesting side of this job: the one where challenges are won to offer the best to our clients and the people inside Objectway, that depend on the datacenter infrastructure to get their job done.