Adelaide-based Web hosting company Hostworks is ramping up its investment in server virtualisation after re-signing its biggest customer, NineMSN, for a further three to six years.
Hostworks, which has been hosting NineMSN's network of 130 Web sites since the portal began operation in 1997, will continue to provide its services to the Nine/Microsoft joint venture until 2013.
Hostworks CEO Marty Gauvin said NineMSN's online presence has quadrupled in size since 2003.
The Web-hosting specialist is now looking at investing in higher density servers and virtualisation software to cater for continued growth.
"With new customers and renewals, around 70 percent will have a level of virtualisation included in the solution," he said.
"But it's horses for courses as to where you use it. There are still some weaknesses in the current virtualisation technologies on the market that limit it."
Gauvin said it is difficult to virtualise around high I/O applications such as streaming, Web serving, or storage area networking (SAN). "Basically, anything that's pushing a lot of bytes," he said.
Second, the size of a virtual machine is limited, he said.
"Let's say you have 10 four-way quadcore hosts for a big site like Big Brother or NineMSN," he said. "To use all the power of the machines, each core counts as a CPU. The downside is you end up with 40 virtual servers, which is hard to manage.
Hostworks thus tends to only use virtualisation on smaller one- and two-way servers for smaller clients or those with low throughput paths.
Hostworks' server consolidation is somewhat unique in that they are deploying virtualisation tools from both VMware and Microsoft.
Most of Hostworks' customers choose VMware, but NineMSN insists on using Microsoft. "The reason we are deploying both is that NineMSN is half-owned by Microsoft," Gauvin said.
Gauvin says Microsoft's Virtual Server product is very stable -- but where with VMware you can virtualise to four virtual computers per processor, with Microsoft you only get one.
"We expect that to change significantly when Microsoft releases Longhorn in 2008," he said. "Longhorn will change the game in terms of the balance between the two vendors."
The use of virtualisation technology, Gauvin said, is reducing the number of physical servers Hostworks needs to deploy for a new client by around 20 percent.
"But if you include that we're also using higher density machines and blades, then the reduction in use of actual rack space is more like 30 percent," he said. "The footprint for the same customer base as such is decreasing."
In the last 12 months, over 25 percent of Hostworks' new server purchases have been blade servers. By next year, Gauvin expects that more than 50 percent of new servers will be blades.
"A lot of vendors have only this year hit price and performance points worth looking at," he said. "Prior to this year it had been hard to make a case for blades."
The hosting company currently uses blade chassis from HP (C-Class) and Sun -- traditionally the company's biggest computer suppliers.
But Gauvin said Hostworks is by no means locked in to these vendors and is always interested in what other companies are providing.
He said server consolidation projects, if run sensibly, should cut down energy usage.
"In most circumstances, virtualising servers will reduce power consumption, but not in every case," he said. "It does for us because we like to keep a significant amount of headroom on our machines. Most of our clients have unexpected peaks in traffic."
"Power consumption isn't an issue until you push a server to over 80 percent of its capacity -- that's when it gets far worse. It would be unusual for us to push a machine to that level."
