Articles

Virtualization has transformed how many businesses use their IT infrastructure to provide services to their customers. Having an on-demand pool of resources enables companies to provide seamless applications to customers quicker than ever. These applications are higher performing, highly available and earth friendly. Recently, virtualization has shifted from “Let’s virtualize our infrastructure to save money” to “Let’s virtualize our infrastructure to better serve our customers and facilitate innovation!” By virtue of this shift in focus, industries such as time and attendance, are integrating virtualization into their long-term strategic goals in unique creative ways.

In the time and attendance industry, PeopleNet has used virtualization to solve many industry related problems and to better serve our client base. For example, anybody who is involved with workforce management or HR knows about the Monday crunch. On Mondays, time attendance data is collected thru time clocks, web timesheets, fax timesheets and interactive voice response(IVR) for each employee to be processed for payroll for the previous work week. The system utilization during the Monday crunch is 5 times higher than any other day of the week. With traditional IT infrastructures, IT managers are forced to allocate a heavy amount of resources to facilitate these kind of spikes in utilization. Unfortunately, these resources would sit almost idle for the rest of the week once customer demand drops off. This is a huge waste of IT resources. Think of all the hard drives sitting idle. Think of all the processors and network cards just waiting for the next weeks Monday crunch. Virtualization can help solve this problem. With a virtualized infrastructure you can expand or retract your processing resource pool dynamically to facilitate these swings in demand. This allows managers to re-allocate resources to a test environment, other types of processing, or something else that will require resources during off peak processing hours.

Another key benefit of virtualization is that it has allowed PeopleNet to reduce the time to market with new features. Not only has the development lifecycle been reduced, but new features are better tested. For example, during development, snapshots of the production servers can be loaded onto a test environment in minutes not days. These snapshots are not only perfect replicas of data but also perfect replicas of the production hardware and the production operating environment. This eliminates many hardware related or operating environment bugs during the development process. Once the code is complete we can use another virtualized environment to QA the new features. When it’s time to roll the feature from development into production, no new servers will have to be procured or loaded. We can just roll the virtual servers into production.

Maybe the most important feature of virtualization is providing flexibility and scalability. If a server is getting overloaded, allocate more virtual resources to that virtual server or increase the number of virtual servers that are used for processing. Adding memory, processing power or more network throughput to a virtual server takes minutes. If a virtual machine is running out of disk space, just allocate more space on the fly. We can double the capacity of a database server with zero downtime. We don’t have to anxiously wait on our hardware venders to deliver new servers or disks to add capacity. It’s all handled by virtualization.

For the future, PeopleNet is leveraging it’s virtual environment and to drastically reduce the complexity and time to recover during a disaster. Virtualization provides a standardized platform and operating environment for each of our datacenters. It also helps in facilitating replicating the Peoplenet applications. Our goal is to leverage multiple datacenters, PeopleNet’s core applications and virtualization to reduce the recovery time of a major disaster to a few minutes.