Tom Vaughan, head of IT infrastructure at the row.park Cancer Research Center in Buffalo, New York, is facing a challenge that many data center managers are familiar with. He operates two redundant data centers, there are about 300 servers and six competent IT maintenance personnel. Vaughan said: "This is the case in many data centers. servers are everywhere and the space has already been occupied, the power supply is not enough, and the data center is becoming bloated, so we cannot implement control well ".
As the world's leading cancer research and medical institution, row.it staff need to constantly support new research tools, medical records, or all applications around medical activities, Vaughan said: "We are experiencing a grave threat, with the addition of servers, and sometimes the addition of multiple servers at a time, the IT infrastructure is already overwhelmed ".
To make things more complex, the Vaughan team has to handle three audits each year, one from the row.board of directors, the other from the Finance Department, and the last from the HIPAA-related audits.
Vaughan said: "We are constantly being disturbed by various auditing tasks. Most of the time they are asking, are all servers set up the same? ', The answer is different. We are losing control and the situation is getting worse and worse ".
Vaughan said that he knew that the virtualization technology was used to integrate servers. row.mainly used Windows platforms, But Vaughan had to choose VMware because many of VMware's tools, Hyper-V, were not available yet.