The biggest challenge the agency faces is ensuring that applications can move seamlessly from the physical to virtual worlds because the agency does not own the application, Rivera said.
Another challenge is more cultural. “I have had to prove to customers that the move to a virtualization environment doesn’t [degrade] performance or efficiencies,” he said. “It is educating a customer base that their application [still] sits in their own domain where it is under their own control.”
Meanwhile, EPA is just starting a multiyear effort to address server sprawl in computer rooms spread across the country.
The agency has one main data center located in Raleigh, N.C., that hosts all the agency’s enterprisewide applications. The facility has about 450 servers with 120 terabytes of storage and a petabyte of data on tape.
However, the agency has 40 computer rooms, small data centers that officials want to drastically cut down to a few, said Myra Galbreath, chief technology officer and director of EPA’s Office of Technology Operations and Planning.
EPA started dabbling with virtualization about four years ago with the implementation of IBM P Series Unix-based servers, she said. That system offered logical partitioning of workloads, and as a result, EPA data center managers were able to put about 36 virtual instances across six physical servers.
Later, EPA adopted 3Par storage technology, which lets agency managers support increased storage provisioning and data duplication. That helped reduce the volume of data that EPA needed to replicate to its disaster recovery site.
Last year, local sites and laboratories started to get into server virtualization, Galbreath said. The agency is trying to assess what has worked best, so officials can set a standard that all local sites can adopt.
EPA also has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Green Grid, a consortium of industry and government organizations that promotes energy-efficient computing, to study how the small computer rooms can reduce power consumption.
“There has been a lot of work on large data centers but not a lot on small computer rooms," Galbreath noted. "And lots of government [agencies] have these small computer rooms."
As EPA tackles server virtualization in small, decentralized computer rooms, Arizona’s Department of Environmental Quality has achieved a more energy-efficient data center with HP blade servers and VMware software.
