Elizabeth Wasserman: Why did you start looking at server virtualization?
Jonathan Bryce: We run about 30,000 websites and applications right now and 10,000 databases. We have a lot of customers and a lot of traffic we manage for our customers each month. We take a lot of the headaches off their plate by putting the headaches on our plate. We have hundreds of servers and many networks we have to manage. As we started to scale up over the last year, we were having problems managing everything on separate physical servers. That is why we started looking at virtualization.
The great thing about virtualization is it separates all the stuff that’s installed on the computer — the operating system and all the software — from the actual physical computer. We can basically make an image of a server and move it around between different hardware. If a server needs more capacity, we can take what was running on one physical box and see if we can move it to another physical box that has more capacity. The same thing is true if a server fails; we can take what was running on that server and move it to another server without a problem.
Wasserman: How has this helped business?
Bryce: A lot of places are adopting virtualization for testing environments and server consolidation. They want to take 50 servers all on different boxes and virtualize them down to five physical boxes for cost savings, and save power and more room in their data centers. That’s not really the benefit we were looking for. We wanted to be able to virtualize our environment to help us to manage it better. We have grown almost three times this year in size in terms of the infrastructure we manage and resources we run for customers. Having a server is like having a car. Having 300 servers is like having 300 cars. There’s always one that has a flat tire or needs an oil change. There is always something wrong with one of them. Being able to separate the server software and everything running on a server from the actual physical hardware, it really helps with the management side of things.
