September 24th, 2006
Saving money with Slices
We’ve had a few customers inquire about bulk Slice purchases for various reasons including: classroom use, virtual infrastructure, load balancing and more. These are all great ideas. For businesses, considering a cluster of Slices for server consolidation makes even more sense. Check out this stat:
We estimate conservatively that for every workload moved from a physical to virtual environment, customers can save about $290 in electricity costs, and about $360 a year in cooling costs. The more important thing is that these savings accrue year after year.
Wow! Let us know if you’re interested in a bulk purchase and we can put something together for you. With skyrocketing cooling and data center costs, there’s never been a better time to consider virtual server consolidation.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:00 PM Scott
Virtualization is great for server utilization, as in theory the usage pattern will be random enough to spread the load.
However it is not always the case.
We run a few boxes at work to run training workshops for our clients. Our web-based apps usually scale pretty well. Except in the case when our traing instructor tells our clients to “now, everyone clicks on that button to generate the mega consolidation report…”
Then the engineers are all running around screaming when the smoke bursts out from the server room.
Now get back to “classroom use”. While virtualization is very cost effective in many scenarios, sometimes you just wish each person has his/her own physical box :)
March 17th, 2008 at 10:00 PM matt
Certainly not always ideal Scott – I can see the “everyone click now” being a big problem. The classroom use actually comes from smaller university CS programs that want to teach Linux development, but can’t afford the resources/expertise to maintain a Linux lab. Since most of the students are beginners, Slices are a great choice.