Mortgage
lender Kensington Mortgages is to use
virtualisation technology to control the escalating costs of
its
data recovery process as the business expands and customer
numbers increase.
The company has bought
virtualisation technology from StoreAge, a partner of software
supplier CA. The technology sits within CA’s Brightstore
storage-management software and will allow the company to
reduce the number of its servers from 160 to about 90 across its
production, development and testing environments.
The business has
grown from a small to a medium-sized company, increasing its staff
from 70 to 450 people in two and a half years.
“When customers
started to escalate, we had to decide what we could do internally
to keep costs down,” said John Low, head of shared services at the
company.
“All too often the
answer with storage is to throw more hardware at the problem, but
we were not satisfied with that, and the CA StoreAge proposition
meant we did not have to take that lazy and expensive approach.”
The cost, space and time savings combined with the flexibility made
virtualisation a “no brainer,” he said.
Kensington will
use the virtualisation software in its planned off-site datacentre.
The company currently works with a third party off-site back-up
service provider to secure data. Low said that although this
provided almost guaranteed recovery capabilities, storage costs had
spiralled.
“We are moving
towards a dual-site strategy and the virtualisation software makes
it easy to transfer data within the storage system, which gives us
flexibility,” he said.
Clive Longbottom, analyst at
Quorcirca, said any company
not looking at virtualised storage environments is missing a trick.
“It allows you to increase capacity, optimise investment and
utilise existing equipment,” he said.
Longbottom agreed
that data-transferring capabilities make virtual environments
effective. “You can transfer in a matter of minutes or hours rather
than over a day, and it gives you greater business continuity and
disaster tolerance.”
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