Founded in 2003, ServerCave provides tailored network solutions for small-to-medium businesses with a focus on professional offices. Competing with larger companies in the market, ServerCave thrives because of its commitment to customer service. This commitment brought ServerCave and its employees—50% of whom are in the IT department—to explore virtualization solutions and the benefits the technology might provide.
ServerCave’s data center is mostly custom built with IBM servers using AMD Opteron 246 and AMD-V 2000 series processors. A ServerCave developer introduced to Chris Rogers, President of ServerCave, the Citrix XenServer virtualization option.
As a business serving the SMB community, ServerCave strives to keep its overhead low in order to pass savings onto customers, and Rogers saw virtualization as a means of increasing savings. “Up until then, we had the standard dedicated-server and shared-server hosting model,” said Rogers. “But then we started going down the road of integrating XenSource virtualization into the server environment to consolidate servers and increase savings.”
ServerCave joined the XenServer beta program in March 2006 and upgraded in August of that year to the production version.
The initial deployment and testing of open source Xen took a couple of weeks, but with Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition, that changed. “Xen was a project you downloaded and figured out yourself, and now, with XenServer, you grab the CD, pay the license fee, and are quickly up and running,” explained Rogers. “With XenServer Enterprise Edition, ten minutes to Xen is correct. The results speak to the maturity of the project and how far Xen and Citrix have come.”
ServerCave researched and tested other virtualization projects before deploying Citrix XenServer. Rogers knew about user-mode Linux, but felt it wasn’t robust enough; he also looked at VMware but could not support their method of virtualization. “VMware is just the wrong way of doing things,” said Rogers. “The hardware abstraction and virtualization they do is, in my opinion, inferior to the paravirtualization of Citrix XenServer.”
ServerCave chose Citrix XenServer because of paravirtualization’s lower overhead and greater scalability. They also liked XenServer’s open source roots and its cost-effective price point. Rogers also noted: “Very honestly, I like the company. I like dealing with Citrix. All of the people that I’ve talked with—they’re always friendly, they’re always helpful, and they have that shine in their eyes of new and cool technology.”
Once ServerCave deployed Citrix XenServer, they began to reshape the structure of their data center to fully exploit virtualization. “We started designing around XenServer, asking ourselves how we could use this technology more effectively,” said Rogers. “We came out with a virtualized model, a massive storage array, and individual servers with no hard drives.”
Although the company had not initially been drawn to virtualization to solve an underlying technological issue, virtualization enabled ServerCave to expand in new ways.
“It wasn’t a solution to a problem, so much as it was a new direction,” Rogers admitted. “What we had was working perfectly fine; however; this works much better. It allows us flexibility and scalability, and gives us cost savings on hardware, hosting, power and data center space.”
ServerCave has five Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition licenses and runs around 50 virtual machines. The company can put as few as 15 and as many as 40 customers on a server, and is able to give them exactly the resources they need. “We can sell a customer a server with a certain amount of memory and disk space, and they can come to me two months later and go, ‘Wow, we just really grew,’ and I can instantaneously ramp them up to more memory, more disk space, and more CPU rather than say, ‘You’re on this one server, now we have to move you over to another one, and there’s an expense of getting a new server,” said Rogers.
For 2007, ServerCave projects significant cost savings based on sales and offerings to customers and expenses that would have gone to dedicated servers and maintenance. However, Rogers added, “If we have the kind of sales this year that I think we might have, that number will be substantially higher.” Another boon to ServerCave productivity is their ability to easily administrate Windows servers. “We avoided Windows machines like the plague because they required extra man hours and were harder to support, but now we can virtualize with Citrix XenServer and the administration is so much easier,” Rogers laughed. “Now my Linux engineers can support Windows.”
Overall, Rogers has been extraordinarily pleased with virtualization: “It’s a cost savings for my customers, headaches savings for me, and I more efficiently use and more efficiently charge for my servers and services.”
With the April 2007 update of Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition, ServerCave looks forward to integrating iSCSI SAN support, which will allow the company to leverage its centralized storage arrays without needing to go to the expensive Fibre Channel, which XenServer currently supports. And for the near future, ServerCave anticipates the availability of XenServer's high availability features which will be a major selling point for several new ServerCave customers.
Citrix XenServer has transformed the ServerCave data center and addressed needs of the company. “Features we needed—features we worked on with the developers and helped beta test—are in the XenServer software. Additionally features we will need are on the road map,” concluded Rogers. “It’s been a really great experience.”
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