Oregon launches data center, virtualization initiatives
The state of Oregon is embarking on a data center consolidation and virtualization
project that officials say will save $10 million to $12 million per year.
The project, which costs $43 million, was started in 2005 with the construction
of a new data center in Salem, the state capital, in which 11 separate state
agency data centers serving 45,000 employees will be consolidated. The project
is scheduled to conclude in June 2009 with a new Gigabit Ethernet backbone and
virtual circuits replacing a frame relay network to support new applications
and a converged infrastructure.
It will mark the first time Oregon has standardized its data center and network
infrastructure architectures as well.
"Going to a shared service infrastructure for IT was going to significantly
reduce costs, as well as standardize the environment which is going to improve
quality," says Mark Reyer, administrator of the Oregon State Data Center
(SDC). "It will improve the cycle time and agility of the application programming
efforts to be able to develop on standard platforms."
Reyer spent 15 years with IBM directing the company's data center outsourcing
and consolidation business for Fortune 500 clients such as Allied-Signal and
United Technologies. With the Oregon SDC, Reyer is also looking to drive energy
efficiency and carbon emission reduction -- state managers expect to reduce
power consumption by 30%, with an additional 25% reduction upon completion of
server consolidation.
The data centers to be converted under the program belong to 11 state agencies,
including Administrative Services, Consumer and Business Services, Corrections,
Employment, Forestry, Housing and Community Services, Human Services, Oregon
State Police, Revenue, Transportation and Veterans' Affairs.
Oregon is standardizing on Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 3750 switches, 7200 and
2800 series routers (compare
router products), and MDS storage area network switches. The state is also
implementing Cisco firewall, intrusion detection/prevention and network access
control products.
Oregon has no plans thus far to implement Cisco's VFrame Datacenter orchestration
product, which was introduced along with Cisco's Datacenter 3.0 release last
summer. VFrame and Datacenter 3.0 have been slow to gain market traction to
date. Data Center 3.0 is centered on virtualizing and orchestrating server,
storage and network provisioning resources to achieve cost and resource-provisioning
efficiencies.
"We're evaluating a lot of the data center newer releases but we're not
[implementing them] at this point," says Al Grapoli, network systems manager
at the SDC.
The project involves 1,520 servers, 425 terabytes of SAN storage, two 1,200
MIPS mainframes, 50,000 network devices, 225 Unix and 50 AS/400 midrange processors,
and 7,000 switches and routers. Within the new data center, rows of servers
and storage devices will be interconnected via 10 Gigabit Ethernet, while Gigabit
Ethernet will connect resources within each row.
Externally, up to 30,000 T-1 frame relay circuits in a hub-and-spoke configuration
will be replaced with Ethernet virtual circuits in a range of speeds from 5M
to 100Mbps, officials say. Oregon is looking to Qwest and its Metro Optical
Ethernet service to fulfill this requirement, Grapoli says.
Oregon is also looking to have several statewide hubs instead of just one in
Salem.
"Right now everything homes here at the data center so we'd like to distribute
that out further," Grapoli says.
Some of the state's larger agency locations will have direct 100Mbps Ethernet
fiber links to the new Gigabit Ethernet backbone ring, Grapoli says. Portland,
meanwhile, will have 622Mbps OC-12 connections between offices.
Within Salem, state agencies will be connected to the SDC over a 1G to 2Gbps
SONET ring, Grapoli says.
The redundant Gigabit Ethernet backbone will implement MPLS to support applications
such as telehealth and online education, Grapoli says. So far, implementing
MPLS has been the biggest challenge of the SDC project, officials say.
"We learned a lot there in terms of the variations in the IOS command
set that were not obvious at the beginning," Grapoli says. "What we're
doing is looking at the MPLS management offering that Cisco has... [and] making
sure what's applied on a switch or router is what should be applied, and making
sure we're not knocking things down when the set up commands are applied."
Next steps include transitioning agency IT functions over the next two years
and rolling out collaborative communications and security enhancements such
as VoIP and end-to-end encryption, officials say.
The SDC's data center consolidation initiative is part of the state's six-year
plan to remodel IT services and adheres to the federal government's 1993 consolidation
standards.
» posted by abennett
Network World
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
