CIOs who have converted to virtualisation are keen to praise its cost benefits and preach the green benefits of its power savings, but for many the major benefits are yet to be realised. The virtualisation process provides massive opportunity to align IT with the business, and CIOs who are ahead of the virtualisation curve are taking that opportunity.
Most CIOs who have gone down the virtualisation route are still in the process of virtualising their server farm. The early adopters are going beyond that, using the virtualised structure to be more responsive to the business. They are also the first who are considering how to manage being victims of their own success and how to continue to be responsive to the opportunities offered by virtualisation.
Once servers are virtualised, IT staff can provision servers in minutes, test new systems while the servers are online, and install security patches without downtime. Chris Tunnecliffe, group infrastructure architect at global reinsurance firm Aspen, describes the day-to-day benefits he has seen after virtualising servers. “The service improvements are vast. We don’t have to constantly speak to the business about downtime. We are a true 24/7 business.”
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Business driver
Tunnecliffe believes that the virtualisation process has allowed him to take a key role in driving the business. “Yesterday, I was sitting in a meeting with the risk managers – the heart and soul of reinsurance – who are planning a whole new application platform and want to know the lead time for implementation.
“In the past, that would have involved 20-30 servers and making sure there was enough power supply for them. It would literally have taken months. But I was able to tell them it would take less than a month.”
Tunnecliffe adds: “Remote users that used to gain access through Citrix clients are excited by this as it gives them a true desktop – there is no application we can’t install. Users can roam globally, or between desks. Our employees are risk-modelling people and tend to run heavy applications. We were affected by heavy users slowing down the system, whereas VMware [the leader in virtualisation software] migrates the heavy user.”
IT director Steven Dobson implemented virtualised servers to meet the business continuity and disaster-recovery needs of online pharmacy Pharmacy2u, which serves 250 general-practice surgeries across the UK. He then realised that the virtualisation he had implemented to ensure business continuity could also be used to grow the business.
Pharmacy2u hosts white-label pharmacy e-commerce systems, including one for a major supermarket. Some of its potential partners are much smaller though, and the cost of investing in servers and the hosting fees for smaller partners meant that Pharmacy2u was being forced to decline business.
“The fees were adding up, so we turned a few partners away. Now we can right-click and paste another server on to the network, rebrand it and the new partner is set up,” says Dobson.
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