The business division of MTN South Africa has launched a server virtualisation solution which the company calls the next progression in its data centre services and hosting.

“Justifying the adoption of a virtual server solution to our customers is almost unnecessary considering that topics of virtualisation and cloud computing hit the headlines in 2009 and market trends and opinions indicate that it’s certainly not just hype,” says MTN Business Infrastructure & Technology GM Edwin Thompson.

A World Wide Worx survey, commissioned by MTN Business in 2009, indicated that 58% of 200 corporate information technology (IT) decision-makers and managers were already using cloud computing services and 63% were using virtualisation.
Cloud computing also topped research consultancy Gartner’s list of the ten top technologies that IT personnel needed to plan for in 2010.

Given the additional bandwidth capacity currently being made available to Africa through undersea fibre-optic cables, the dominance of the Internet, and the transition from hardware to software and services, the landscape is becoming increasingly competitive and companies must shift their strategies and implement cost cutting measures to survive these new market dynamics, adds Thompson.

Operating Expenditure

“What we have seen is that organisations can achieve savings of between 10% and 30% of the typical operating expenditure (opex) environment. 
“This may not seem big percentagewise, but, in a large organisation, this can be a lot valuewise,” explains MTN Business head of product development and marketing Mike Fairon.

Virtualisation means there is a decrease in infrastructure that companies have to buy. 
From this follows an opex reduction because with each server a company needs maintenance contracts, support personnel, and housing for the infrastructure in a data centre somewhere.

Fairon explains that further opex savings come from electricity savings because less air conditioning is required, as well as savings in facilities like the uninterruptible power supply chilling plant distribution frame, the cabling, the wiring, support, and so on.

Explaining virtualisation, Fairon notes that infrastructure is typically deployed in such a way that a server is dedicated to an operating system that is dedicated to an application. 

Hardware Infrastructure
And when an IT department buys that hardware infrastructure, it buys it for the peak load of the application on that hardware. 
This peak load might be only a few days in a month – for example, if someone is doing heavy month-end processing, the server would operate at 70% to 80% utilisation, while, for the month, it typically runs at about 10% to 15% utilisation.

“We create infrastructure where we share resources, so we share central processing unit power, we share Ram, memory, and disc space – and what we are able to do is share the resourcing over the different appli-
cations, so an application is no longer dedi-cated to a specific infrastructure,” he notes.

“So you get far better use of your infrastructure than you would out of a typical dedicated environment where you have one server for one application.”

The virtual server solution gives a company a solution that is accessed through a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, or the public Internet, and because there is no physical hardware present, it is, as the name implies, ‘virtual’, with services ‘in the cloud’. 
This approach provides customers 
with a value-added service that will 
meet individual business needs, save 
costs and make for easy implementation, and will also provide security and service flexibility.


“Our server virtualisation solution and drive towards collaborative, viable cloud computing technologies are destined to reshape our customers’ IT infrastructure,” states Thompson.

“A lot of planning is required around this – you can’t just take a number of applications and virtualise them on one server. 
“You have to understand the utilisation, and the load, and the criticality of that load within the business,” notes Fairon.

“The customer’s virtual server exists in its own capsule to provide complete security and separation from any other virtual server that happens to exist in the shared infrastructure. 
“Resources are guaranteed and performance is constantly monitored to ensure that our customer’s service is never negatively impacted,” says Thompson.

The solution also offers high resilience and availability, with backup service options. 
A range of the most recent versions of operating systems (both Microsoft and Unix) and applications is made available to each virtual server, resulting in installation being a quick and easy process.
Having common applications available on demand means MTN Business customers can benefit from the deployment of a server 
almost instantaneously, allowing adminis-trators to turn that server into a mail server, a Web server or a database server, for example.