Reduce Cost with Librato Containers
Cost Savings from Server Consolidation
In most organizations today, the average x86 server utilization rates range between 7% and 15%.1 In the current economic environment, getting the most out of your data center infrastructure is critical. By increasing utilization, server consolidation allows you to achieve that and more—help reduce cost.
With server consolidation, you can immediately save the full cost of every server you no longer need if you rent server capacity in a third party data center. If you own the physical servers, you can immediately save the operational expenses – power and cooling, maintenance and support contracts, system administration, etc. – which are typically about 40% of the total server cost.
Librato Load Manager™ for Container Virtualization
Librato Load Manager is an easy-to-deploy container virtualization solution that groups applications into resource containers and manages access to physical resources such as CPU, memory, storage I/O and network bandwidth. With multiple containers on a physical server running a single operating system (OS) instance, Librato provides a safe and fast way to deliver increased server utilization and consolidation.
Librato’s Approach: Realize the Full Cost Savings of Server Consolidation
Much attention has been given to server virtualization as the foundation technology for server consolidation. Librato takes a different approach that enables you realize all of the cost benefits of reducing the number of physical servers.
- Reduce the number of OS licenses and OS images to manage: By reducing the number of physical servers, you can also reduce associated costs such as power and cooling. However, in a typical server virtualization implementation, the number of virtual servers remains the same. Since each virtual server requires its own OS, server virtualization leaves room for additional savings.
By hosting multiple containers on a single OS instance, Librato containers enable you to realize the full cost savings of server consolidation – those cost savings associated with OS licenses, maintenance contracts, and administration. - Maximize the utilization of existing server assets to defer capital investment: By enabling multiple applications to run safely on a single server while guaranteeing the SLA of each application, Librato can dramatically increase utilization rates. Furthermore, with its Dynamic Rebalancing capability, Librato Load Manager ensures no resources go unused when applications can benefit from spare capacity beyond their allocations. This rebalancing is done every 10 milliseconds, making 100% server utilization possible.
Once you free up servers through consolidation, you can repurpose these servers for new applications as well as retire old hardware. As a result, you can delay and reduce capital investments while delivering new services and sometimes even consolidate data centers. - Little or no upfront cost: Virtualizing servers usually requires changes in networking, storage, and security infrastructure as well as data protection and disaster recovery solutions. In addition, some virtualization solutions support specific server, storage, and networking configurations per their compatibility matrices. This could result in significant upfront cost.
Librato seamlessly integrates into your existing data center infrastructure. The only special requirement for Librato Load Manager is a small x86 server, with 2 GB of RAM and 200 GB of storage space, to serve as the central management and monitoring data repository. No changes to the applications, OS, infrastructure or IT processes are required. This non-disruptive approach allows you to minimize upfront cost while getting the most out of your IT infrastructure investments.
1 Gartner, “Energy Savings via Virtualiztaion: Green IT on a Budget,” G00161153, November 10, 2008: 2