The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) is using
virtualisation to cut its hardware costs, recover quickly from
systems failures and maintain business continuity.
In the next six months, the ATL will move all of its
applications over to a VMWare virtual environment, which it
implemented last July. This will enable the association to halve
its server count and get a single view of all its computing
resources using the Vmotion tool.
Virtualisation allows an organisation to pool its computing
resources across a smaller number of physical machines.
This summer, the ATL’s IT team will bring a Blackberry server
under VMWare to support 25 Blackberry mobile devices.
The association faced a challenge when adopting VMWare’s
technology, as the association only had a small IT team with
limited resources, said Ann Raimondo, head of IT at the ATL.
“From a team perspective, you have to have talent in lots of
different areas, such as security, networking, applications and
development, and also a good solid infrastructure background –
because it is pretty much all hands on deck when things go pear
shaped,” she said.
When ATL adopted the system, some of its software and
integration suppliers refused to support applications that were
being moved to a virtualised environment, as the technology was
considered immature.
“There were some initial concerns; most of our suppliers had not
gone through any quality assurance with [VMWare]. We took a few
risks,” said Raimondo.
She added that a self-taught in-house network specialist
migrated the first four applications in a month. He has since
become trained and accredited.
One major benefit of virtualisation for ATL has been the
management flexibility. “Vmotion allows you to move virtual servers
around, and this was fairly new territory to us. We were able to
move a whole Exchange server and people carried on working, and our
network guy was able to do the physical fixing without any
downtime,” Raimondo said.