Healthcare and technology
Working in Healthcare, you quickly realize that there are few adoptions of bleeding edge or newer technologies, instead we are lucky to have and deploy three year old technologies and strategies. We recently deployed a virtualization strategy that was piggy-backed on a Blade purchase. The Blade purchase was approved in 2005 for 2006 and we were allocated limited funds for a Blade chassis that would be populated with 6 or 7 servers.
After researching our options in early 2006, we realized that many folks were using Virtualization on Blade technology and we started looking at Virtualization solutions. We compared both Microsoft Virtual Server and VMWare ESX server and found the VMWare product to be the better product. We quickly realized the VMWare's ESX server was very stable and deployable, and we proceeded to spend funds allocated for the Blade project on virtualization.
We quickly realized that it was more cost efficient to deploy the VMWare 2 CPU licenses on a robust standalone server with alot of memory, than on a Blade server with limited memory and disk capacity. You can deploy more Virtual servers on a beefy server with 16 or 32 gigs of ram than you can on a Blade server with 8 to 16 gigs of ram. We proved the merits of VMWare from a cost perspective and a deployment perspective and expanded our resources in that area.
This deployment could not have happened if we did not have the Blade funds, however one thing that I have learned is that sometimes you need to be creative to get your job done. We spent more on Virtualization by spending less on the Blade infrastructure and in the long run this benefited the company.
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