BY LAURA BACKUP

In print | Published September 4, 2008

In an effort to increase the reliability and efficiency of Swarthmore’s computer server, Information Technology Services has shifted to virtual servers, which will allow the college to consolidate the servers by hosting multiple applications on a single piece of hardware. In the past, certain applications required individual hardware, but the new servers are partitioned in such a way that they are capable of supporting multiple different systems simultaneously. Though no longer physically independent, “they run just as independently as if they were still their own stand-alone hardware,” Chief Information Technology Officer Gayle Barton said. Swarthmore is at the forefront of the virtualization movement. Though IBM mainframes were capable of running multiple services on a single computer 30 years ago, the technology has only recently become available for mainstream computing.

Similar programs at other liberal arts colleges are currently in development: Bryn Mawr has very recently begun to virtualize its server and Haverford intends to begin the process soon.
“I do think the industry as a whole is moving in this direction; I do think Swarthmore got an early and aggressive start in doing this, and it’s gone very well,” Barton said. A number of prominent businesses have likewise turned to virtual servers, in order to cut costs and optimize performance. “Industry is going for virtualization because they want to reduce data center space,” Data Center Supervisor Don Tedesco said.

Though cost of space is not a critical issue at Swarthmore, the shift to virtual servers nonetheless provides the college with the opportunity to support additional applications.
With the virtualized data center, the space now contains far less hardware than was previously required.

The college is currently equipped with eight physical servers, each of which can accommodate 16 to 20 virtual servers. This “allows [ITS] to be much more responsive in providing services,” Tedesco said. While ITS does monitor its hardware, rarely used servers are sometimes neglected and thus problems with such hardware can go undetected.

The consolidated servers are more robust than isolated servers, as well as easier to monitor and update. System Administrator Jason Rotunno described the new system as “more reliable … if one server goes down, it’s automatically moved to another piece of hardware.”

Servers reside in two separate data centers, one in Beardsley and one in Parrish. In the event of a problem, ITS is capable of migrating a server to the alternate center without halting the applications.
A piece of hardware can be taken down for service without affecting the services it provides.
“The goal is for everything to be redundant, everything set up for automatic failover,” Barton said.
Ideally, hardware malfunctions will have absolutely no effect on the campus’s access to applications.
Aside from reliability and ease of maintenance, the virtual servers are vastly more energy-efficient, as the eight virtual servers consume much less power than the dozens of individual servers that they replaced.

There are also a number of less evident benefits. Tedesco explained that servers generate a significant amount of heat and require a strictly controlled, air-conditioned environment. Since investing in virtual servers, “we’re using a lot less air conditioning…we had no cooling problems this summer whatsoever [and] we’re below what it was specced for,” Tedesco said.
“[Various types of hardware] require dangerous chemicals, caustic chemicals, things that are hard to dispose of … [because of virtualization] we’ve reduced power, we’ve reduced cooling, and down the road we will be putting 18 fewer servers into that waste stream.”

Server virtualization is conducted through downsizing and streamlining rather than proactive upgrades. “We move a service to the virtual server when we need to upgrade or when the hardware is at the end of its life,” Barton said. “We have to upgrade servers at such a frequent pace that it works nicely.”

Some of the applications used by the college are natural candidates for virtualization.
Tedesco cited the protocol DHCP, which “needs to be running all the time, but in reality uses a very low amount of RAM and has a very low network load … those two coexist nicely … [another application] wouldn’t even task a dorm room computer. There’s no reason to give it its own server.”
Some applications, however, are less compatible with virtualization. “Streaming media is one that doesn’t work well, it’s such a high bandwidth application … there are some things that just don’t function well in that environment,” Barton said.

Though it is likely that some applications will never be virtualized, ITS hopes to soon finish consolidating all servers with applications that can be virtualized without compromising service.
Tedesco said that he thinks it probable that all viable applications will be virtualized by the summer of 2009.

« RETURN TO NEWS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »