How to Virtualize Your Servers and Load Balancers by Abtech Systems

Abtech delivers virtualization benefits beyond servers –

Abtech Systems provides unique in depth analysis that considers critical core-applications as well as other applications and systems that have a significant impact on your bottom line.

You also have racks of power & network equipment, front-end web and application servers, load balancers, network appliances and other applications that can benefit from a consolidation plan providing you with increased flexibility, better scalability, higher availability and a reduced footprint.

Abtech’s Vitualize Everything™ Assessment identifies these additional candidates for consolidation and virtualization, and we show you where you can realize additional cost savings in your virtual data center.

Storage Virtualization

For some service providers and manufacturers who would guide you through the server virtualization process, data storage and network design is an after thought or possibly not a consideration. Other providers may put some thought into data storage however, they limit recommendations to completely replacing existing storage models.

For their customers, the cost savings realized in server consolidation is often traded for purchase of new storage arrays that carry high costs for hardware, support and software licenses.

Building a virtual storage network that improves high-availability, reduces costly resources and simplifies storage management should be a major focal point in virtualizing your data center. Like server virtualization, it too should offer fast ROI and low TCO for having implemented it.

Abtech can help you optimize data storage in a virtual environment, with a plan that includes your existing storage systems and offers the best strategy for serving applications with better performance & availability, simplified storage allocation and improved business continuance.

Key benefits to Abtech designed virtual storage networks –

• Improved high-availability & storage services for all applications
• Reduced costs – energy consumption, hardware, services, administration & expansion
• Simplified storage management
  • Thin provisioning
  • LUN & Volume creation / expansion
  • Data migration & replication
• Integrated data services across SAN, LAN and WAN
• Zero time back-up window & up to instantaneous point-in-time recovery
• Storage benefits apply to non-virtualized servers & application data, i.e. HP-UX, AIX

With good design, a combination of VMware virtualization and storage virtualization can provide organizations of any size and structure with 0.001% unplanned downtime. In fact, planned downtime is a breeze to manage with automated processes for server upgrades, back-ups, off-site data replication even server creation or cloning and other functions that help improve service-levels for your customers.

Virtualize the kitchen sink?

Virtualizing other non-critical applications such as load balancers, VPN’s, network security devices and other services can provide you with the same benefits as virtualizing core applications servers. You may have racks of network appliances and front-end applications that can also be virtualized, providing new flexibility for deployment, expansion, higher availability and a reduced footprint.

• Non-critical, resource consuming applications
• Development Servers
• VPN’s
• Front End Web Servers
• Load Balancers
• Application Traffic Managers
• Network Monitoring Applications
• Network Security & Services

Many of Abtech’s software partners such as Zeus Technologies, Riverbed and AEP Netilla, offer products that run on top of VMware and replace costly physical appliances which do not scale well for performance or user count changes, nor tier well to meet the demands of the remote office or private cloud.

Imagine having the ability to deploy and scale SSL, load balancing and application traffic management resources on demand, running on existing x86 servers with all of the benefits of a virtual environment. Now, imagine being able to automate scalability, migration and back-up of these applications securely to the appropriate physical resource as demands change.

Netilla SSL VPN appliance, Netilla VE is a software-only virtual appliance that streamlines secure remote application access installations on virtual server offerings such as VMware® ESX. Netilla VE enables enterprise customers and services providers to quickly spin-up new remote access projects on-demand within an existing virtualized server infrastructure without requiring new appliance hardware.

With VMware and Riverbed, you now have a viable solution for virtualized, accelerated branch offices. Virtualizing and consolidating branch office IT can be accelerated over the WAN 10x, 20x or even 30x faster with wide-area data services (WDS), allowing users everywhere to work on centralized data as if it were local. You can make branch offices more productive, safe and cost-efficient.

Zeus Technologies ZXTM Virtual Appliance (ZXTM VA) is a complete virtual appliance that manages application traffic, inspecting, transforming and routing requests as it load-balances them across the application infrastructure.

Typically, with load balancers and traffic management, organizations are forced to purchase appliances that include licenses for a maximum potential usage within a given period, say three years. This means you spend higher up front costs for an appliance with exceedingly larger resources than you require the majority of the time or potentially worse, one sized too low which is outgrown before ROI is realized.

Virtualizing these applications frees you from locked-in performance and provides flexibility for services that are dynamic in nature, with flexible costs structures that match. Implement these into your virtualization plan and you are headed toward the creation of your Private Cloud.

Abtech can go further in identifying applications and resources qualified for virtualization, showing you alternative solutions that will help you build a more dynamic infrastructure.

Start with a Virtualization Assessment or click here to see a full list of VMware products.