In a panel discussion at Interop this week, vendors and customers discussed some lessons learned along the path of server virtualization.
Panelist Mike Leeper, Director of Global Technology at Columbia Sportswear, shared the gory details on how his group went from bare metal to near complete virtualization inside of the last three years.
For Leeper, the biggest challenge in moving to a fully virtualized private cloud wasn’t the technology, it was the people.
“For us to get to a high 90 percentile virtualized environment, we had to convince people we could run workloads under virtualization,” Leeper said. “DBAs didn’t think could meet the performance needs.”
So what Leeper did was he gave the database guys all the resources they wanted with lots of RAM and compute. Then once he got them up and running, he showed them what they were actually consuming. As it turns out, what the database guys thought they needed and what they actually used were two different things.
“We had a more data-rich mature conversation with users of the platform,” Leeper said.
Read the full story at Server Watch:
Interop: From Server Virtualization to Private Cloud
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.