Matthew Stevenson, IT Architect in University IT Services, presented last week on Seton Hall University's server and storage virtualization initiative at Sungard Higher Education Summit 2008, held April 14-17 in Anaheim, CA.
Server and storage virtualization refers to a set of technologies that separate IT software from the hardware it would normally run on. Most IT applications are designed to run on a dedicated server, including dedicated disk space. Virtualization allows IT to run many "virtual machines" on a cluster of computers with shared disk space, dramatically reducing the cost of running each individual application. It enables better overall performance, since servers for individual software applications are usually scaled to accommodate processing peaks which occur infrequently. Virtualization also enables redundancy, since the "virtual machines" can move around the physical computers in the cluster, so the applications continue to run even if one of the physical computers in the cluster fails.
Seton Hall's IT department has a very robust virtualization program. Matt and his team were the first to successfully run Sungard's Banner system in a virtualized environment. This is of great interest to the higher education community, since virtualizing Banner promises to allow Banner to run on much less expensive hardware and enables server redundancy for business continuity. Over fifty people attended Matt's presentation at Sungard Summit 2008 to learn how Matt and his team were able to virtualize Banner.
For an overview of Seton Hall University's server and storage virtualization program, see, for example:
http://tltc.shu.edu/blogs/projects/DoIT/2008/03/shu_presents_at_nercomp_2008.html
