Tag Archives: Craig Callan

System Automation Corp., an 85-person business based in Columbia, Md., provides the MyLicense Suite software to more than 400 government entities in 23 states to manage, for example, teacher and nurse licenses. Network Engineer Craig Callan describes how server virtualization helps keep costs down yet provides better service for customers. Elizabeth Wasserman: What challenges did you encounter at System Automation? Craig Callan: There were often delays setting up testing trials because equipment simply wasn’t available. Quite simply, in many cases, a desktop box wouldn’t be enough. You needed to beef up a desktop box to run a server on it. We needed to do a number of things to get it going. We just didn’t have enough resources. We didn’t have enough servers to keep everybody happy. The process of ordering equipment, setting it up, loading software takes a minimum of about two weeks. Also, we were looking for a way to create a testing platform that would be easy to convert into production for our customers. Although the software starts with a common base, each MyLicense implementation is customized and each customer tests the software. Once testing is completed and the actual implementation is locked, we needed a better way to transition into production. Wasserman: What made you look at virtualization technology? Callan: The fact that I needed a number of servers and it was an increasing number every day. As we started in development of our MyLicense software product, we really needed servers. We tried to host multiple servers on a single box and it didn’t work. We were looking for the ability to quickly deploy servers for the developers as they needed them. Virtualization is the only way to do this. By sharing the resources on a single server, we can roll out servers almost instantly. In-house, we’re currently running three boxes. Two of our main boxes are for virtualization. One is deployment for customer sites, test sites for customers, and the other is for test sites for our own developers and quality assurance people. We’re probably running about 25 sites on each server at the moment. Wasserman: So virtualization helps you deliver products to customers? Callan: It helps us deliver products to customers on time, but also it allows our developers to quickly respond to deploy a new software build to see how it works, to have development sites that are different from our production sites and our quality assurance sites. Developers will go in and change a site and make changes on an ongoing basis and if anyone is trying to share that server they’re going to have some serious problems. So we need to give them their own servers and in many cases dedicated servers to run on the various levels of Oracle that we support and SQL server. We were facing this multiplying need for environments. Wasserman: What have the results been? Callan: We can turn around servers very rapidly now. One of the things that happens, for example, is we’ll do a new build. Within about two hours, I can deploy roughly eight to10 new servers with the new version of the software. Every time we do a build, we simply turn out a number of quality assurance servers for the team to work with. That takes about two hours. I wouldn’t begin to think what the 50 servers would cost me to buy. They run around anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 each these days. So we’ve saved about $75,000 to $100,000 versus I think we’ve put in about between the software licensing everything was $25,000 to $35,000. Wasserman: Tell me about your implementation. Callan: We did it in an afternoon. It seems rather funny now. We got a trial version of Parallel’s Virtuozzo Containers software, worked with the sales people, and I installed the software and created a server with an operating system and installed on an existing server here started at 11 a.m. and had everything up and running by 1 p.m. By the time I went home that night, I had eight servers up.