UK insurer
Norwich Union has rolled out software to help reduce the number
of physical servers it needs for processing data.
Steve Houghton, infrastructure solutions architect at Norwich
Union, said that having 2,500 physical machines running in the
datacentre was consuming a lot of power.
Houghton and his team of 30 IT professionals wanted a system
that would allow them to move critical processing jobs between
physical and virtual machines during peak times.
"This is a huge undertaking, and we knew that it was essential
to deploy a workload migration solution that was up to the task,"
said Houghton.
Norwich Union installed Platespin software to move jobs between
virtual and real services.
The insurer encountered issues with drivers, ageing hardware and
networking that slowed down the deployment process, but overcame
the problems.
"We have seen a improvement in the performance of the data
centre with over 1,000 virtual machines in operation," said
Houghton.
Hougton said the software has saved his team 2,200 hours of
configuration time and effort. "That's a savings of 300 work days
or almost 17 months of labour for our IT team," he said.