In late 2005, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) executives in the agency's Office of Information Management realized they were plagued by aging infrastructure and spiraling maintenance costs as they kicked off an effort to modernize IT service offerings. 

Like many organizations with a growing base of servers, they turned to virtualization, a process that uses software to partition a physical server into multiple virtual environments.

Older servers dedicated to a single application might use only 10 percent of total computing capacity. By virtualizing those machines and moving to fewer physical servers, organizations can realize savings in maintenance, energy and floor space. The method offers relief to fast-growing organizations that are running out of space and power in the data center.

"We got into virtualization originally for the cost avoidance on maintaining a sprawling fleet of aging servers," said the FDA's CIO, Timothy Stitely. Cutting back on the 800 Wintel servers also reduced the data center footprint as the FDA prepares to move to a new building in 2008.

"In January 2006, we identified 325 servers that could eventually be virtualized," he said. Two months later, with help from consultant Booz Allen Hamilton, the FDA used VMware software for a pilot project that migrated 28 physical servers to a virtual machine environment on a cluster of three physical servers.

The move eliminated the need for almost two full-sized racks in the data center. "We were able to cut maintenance costs $75,000 per year for the first 20 servers virtualized," Stitely said. The goal is to virtualize 400 of the FDA's 800 servers by the end of fiscal 2009.

Other benefits of virtualization include improved application stability and uptime. When they need to do hardware maintenance, network staff can do a "live migration" to another physical server. Then, they can finish the maintenance and migrate back to the original server. It eliminates downtime for users.

Joseph Klosky, the FDA's chief technology officer, said virtualization drastically reduced the time it takes to set up new servers. "Our virtual server team can create a server that is loaded with all our add-ons and patches on a disk image. Then, they can just pull the trigger to create a new instance of a server."

Moving Into the Mainstream
The FDA example is fairly typical of how organizations begin virtualizing, said Barb Goldworm, president of Boulder, Colo.-based Focus Consulting. They start looking at it as part of a consolidation strategy and are drawn by the total-cost-of-ownership benefits, said Goldworm, who is also the author of Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs.

Although virtualization has entered the mainstream, the transition process is still in the beginning stage. About 75 percent of large organizations have started down the path to some degree, Goldworm said, but only about 5 percent of those organizations' servers have been virtualized. She estimated that only 20 percent to 40 percent of government organizations have begun the process.

"But smaller groups like city governments, because they tend to be in a homogeneous environment that is not as complex, are able to achieve results more quickly than larger organizations," she said.

The virtualization market is hot. Research from IDC projects that the virtualization services market will grow to $11.7 billion in 2011 from $5.5 billion in 2006. So far, virtualization software has been dominated by Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware, a subsidiary of EMC Corp. But both Microsoft, and Citrix Systems, with its recent purchase of virtualization software firm XenSource, are poised to challenge VMware in this developing market space.

 
Speeding up Provisioning
CIO Debbie Karcher said virtualization has brought multifold benefits to Miami-Dade County Public Schools. The Florida district, the fourth largest in the country with 367 schools and a $5.7 billion budget, began implementing VMware in conjunction with HP BladeSystem servers