Dell’s CIO: Virtualisation Saved Us £100 Million

However, if good innovations are coming from outside the IT organisaiton, then it is even more important to globalise them, so more people can share the benefits. “IT has the best perspective to run these apps globally in the most efficient manner… while also complying with security and regulatory standards.”

With that in mind, Johnson says, “we’ve got a programme of global single instance apps”. Managers have been pushed to cut out little-used apps, partly by making sure their departments are charged on the support and engineering they need. In most cases, the approved app is cheaper, and gets full support.

As a result, national variations and niche applications are disappearing. “We Just crossed under 2800 apps,” Johnson said proudly.

Even getting the inventory of what was out there was difficult, but once Johnson and his team knew what was there, they could classify it. Some apps are unique, and so valuable, they should be run and supported properly. Others have no value and can simply be turned off. The tricky category is the ones which duplicate existing apps, or ones which are soon to be available. They have to be switched off and replaced – while letting users keep their data.

That may sound draconian, but cutting out support of old apps lets managers get resources for new ones, said Johnson. The company operated an “amnesty” for the cleanup: “Admit what you’ve got and hand over the running costs to IT,” explained Johnson. This means that some apps were handed over to the IT department, with developers in tow.

In the short term, this added salaries to the IT department, but that rapidly shook out as apps were turned off.

Ramping up virtualisation

With standard systems, Dell could up virtualisation, becoming the fifth largest VMware virtual server farm in the world, with around 130,000 servers, all of which can be managed from a single console. “We’ve driven server utilisation from the teens up to to in excess of 40 percent,” he said. “I’ve overdoubled compute capacity with no extra power, and freed up floor tiles in existing data centres.”

Dell classifies servers as Class 1, 2 and 3, according to how vital they are and how important their reliability is. Dell has already virtualised its Class 2 and 3 servers, said Johnson: “This year, we start on Class 1.”

All this has had results – the company has consolidated to four co-location centres and, where possible, is “pulling everything back to our data centres in Austin.” Plans to build a new data centre have been dropped.

Is virtualisation reliable?

But what about the argument around the reliability of virtual servers?  “There is a solid argument that virtual machines are more reliable,” said Johnson. They can be more easily reconfigured and monitored, and pushed to different server hardware when needed, he said: “The ability to change hardware under a virtual cluster, or change the hypervisor, decreases the risk of downtime.”