Computing Canada, August 4, 2006, Vol. 32 No. 11

Montreal public transit stops server sprawl

Société de transport de Montréal moves to virtual servers and cuts hardware costs by 30 per cent
8/15/2006 3:00:00 PM By: Vawn Himmelsbach

A public transportation agency is using virtualization to consolidate servers in its data centre, but it's also discovered other benefits such as business continuity.

Société de transport de Montréal operates the city's buses and Métro, and provides 1.3 million trips on its system every day. It's also a VMware Infrastructure 3 beta customer.

For STM, server sprawl was rampant in its data centre. Disaster recovery was inefficient, since it had to double up on hardware to protect its most critical servers. Business continuity wasn't transparent, so if an application went down, users were interrupted until everything came back online.

STM decided to test out the concept of virtualization using a VMware ESX Server. “We started looking at VMware last year as a consolidation tool, but the more we researched it, the more we played with it, we started creating strategies around it, basically all focused toward business continuity,” said Mike Stefanakis, senior systems engineer with Société de transport de Montréal.

So far, virtualization has allowed STM to cut costs by 30 per cent through consolidating its servers at a ratio of 15:1, as well as move virtual machines into production sooner than anticipated and reduce unplanned downtime. “It depends what level you feel comfortable taking it to,” said Stefanakis. “We're going to try to push the envelope with it.”

Enterprise IT organizations are focused on data centre automation across process, technology and management workflows, according to IDC in a recent report entitled, “IT Organizations Speak: Datacenter Automation is an Increasing Focus and Reality in 2006.”

While the largest driver for automating IT processes is reducing costs and human error, says IDC, most IT organizations struggle to make the business case for automation technology.

“People inherently feel uncomfortable about bunkering with other people on shared infrastructure, which is what virtualization is,” said Brian Byun, vice-president of products and alliances with VMware Inc., a subsidiary of EMC Corp. in Palo Alto, Calif. “So that is a cultural thing. People automatically think they get less.” Organizations should focus on the benefits to customers, he said, and making IT a service utility.

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