Tailback Inc. provides an infrastructure service for missioncritical web applications. The service, called GrowServer* makes use of virtualization technology to keep costs low and lead times short; goals which are difficult to achieve with dedicated rental servers. Tailback has extensive experience in operating large-scale web services in the industry, and the company provides a highly reliable infrastructure for the web content distribution businesses of its customers.

Virtualization technology improves business agility

It is very difficult to forecast accurate demand for the webbased content distribution services provided by Tailback's key customers. Not investing enough in hardware resources will affect service performance on the one hand, and over investment will lower profitability on the other. In the past, this issue had a significant impact on the business. Not any more. In April 2004, the company started a new service that makes use of virtualization technology to flexibly allocate virtual servers and storage resources to customers, based on demand. The core of the service consists of IBM eServer* xSeries* 366 that use four Intel® Xeon® Processor MP per server. It runs the 2 types of virtualization middleware which are VMware* ESX for servers & SANmelody* of DataCore Software for storage.

Measures of Success

• Virtualization technology enabled Tailback to reduce the total number of physical servers by housing over 30 virtual servers within each physical server, thus bringing a significant return on investment (ROI) improvement by making effective use of available resources.
• Tailback is better able to respond quickly to fluctuations in customer demand, by flexibly allocating servers and storage when needed, thus avoiding over investment, or having insufficient resources.
• Reducing the number of physical servers has reduced the incidence of faults, thereby the total service reliability improved accordingly.