Dell’s CIO: Virtualisation Saved Us £100 Million

Even people who fear virtualisation may be using it. “A user Oracle RAC [Real Application Clustering] would be somewhat naive to say their Class 1 servers aren’t virtualised,” he said, since Oracle’s RAC users virtualisation.

Dell’s standardisation is fiercest at the hardware level. Above that, it is prepared to have different hypervisors, using Oracle VM and Microsoft Hyper-V, alongside VMware ESX.

“We’re using the same approach as our customers,” he said. “We run a range of different hypvervisors – we’ll use Oracle, of hyper-V when packages are only certified for those, but we use VMware in the vast majority of cases.”

The company isn’t using open source hypervisors such as Xen and KVM to any great extent, but it’s a possibility in the future: “My view is they all work,” said Johnson. “We’ve got to watch the economics, and not stick in a fixed position for ever.”

Indeed, changes like this are much more possible, once the data centre is abstracted from the hardware. “In the old world, we’d rack a server, set up the OS and add applications. Now we’re abstracted from that layer.”

The big picture

“Working for a hardware vendor has been advantageous,” admits Johnson. “Efficiency is a big topic internally, and its Dell’s virtualisation has fed into the green agenda, but the big picture is to do with business benefits”.

The company got its complete server farm under control, with the ability to virtualise almost everything and a declining number of well understood applications. And the biggest benefit from all this is that, unlike too many other CIOs, Johnson says he actually has an increasing budget for new projects.

If you go to Dell for virtualisation, he says, it’s quite likely you may be dealing with someone who worked on Dell’s own operation – and you will certainly get the same methodology. But it’s worth asking how genuine Dell can be when it promises to work with customers, if that means reduced savings for Dell.

Johnson’s answer is as follows: “Virtualisation is here to stay, and if we don’t do it, someone else will.” Doing virtualisation better means getting a bigger share of the business that is moving away from mainframes and specialised RISC machines towards x86 servers, he said: “Dell hasn’t got a mainframe legacy to phase out”.

Also, he points out that virtualisation can add to service revenue, and Dell is all in favour of that.