Dell Software Rescues Boffins From Budget Crisis

Dell Software has helped a top UK research university to make massive cost savings that could help save jobs in academia. By implementing VKernel software to manage the University of Nottingham’s consolidated VMware environment, the service provider has enabled drastic cuts to be made in running costs without lowering the headcount of the faculty.

The university, ranked in the top one percent of universities worldwide with 8,000 staff and 40,000 students, is consolidating its IT by virtualising all servers into its data centres on the UK campus.

Rationalisation

System developer Craig Place said he was swayed to use VKernel for virtualisation management support, rather than alternatives such as VMware’s vCenter,  by a conference on virtualisation. “VKernel was way ahead of all others offering management software,” he claimed.

By rightsizing with VKernel the university has avoided painfully expensive decisions on managing its total capacity, said Place. Identifying waste data helped to reclaim capacity which was reallocated to new virtual machines. The massive savings achieved by consolidation meant the department avoided having to make savage cuts elsewhere.

In one month, Place’s team cleared 200GB of storage, which was enough for 10 extra virtual machines to be created. “Virtualisation projects must reduce overheads,” said Eric Jackson, senior director of product management at Dell Software. Consolidating multiple physical servers is the most painless way to achieve this consolidation and is a preferable alternative to other cuts.”

With the acquisition of Quest Software last July, Dell inherited VKernel which had been bought by Quest in November 2011.