Virtualisation is just the cuppa for
Associated British Foods
(ABF).
The £8.2bn maker of staples such as Twinings teas, Ryvita
biscuits and Silver Spoon sugars is centralising and shrinking its
Intel server farms from around 600 dispersed units into a single,
redundant farm of about 450 servers for about 6,000 desktop
units.
The two-year project, which should complete at the end of 2009,
will save 20% to 30% in operating costs and about £1m a year in
capital costs, ABF IT directorTrevor Hanna told Computer
Weekly.
Hanna said ABF ran a "very federated" organisation that covers
grocery and ingredients manufacture, the Primark retail chain, and
agricultural products. All the divisions ran autonomous IT shops.
The new centre consolidates some 70 sites owned by five divisions
made up of around 16 business units.
The scale of consolidation is not as aggressive as some similar
projects, Hanna said. This was because the business units are
responsible for both their businesses and their IT applications
such as JD Edwards, BPCS, Microsoft Dynamics, Lotus Notes and
others.
Hanna's responsibility is to host the applications and to
provide the means to access them. "We are here to give the business
units exactly what they want," he said. "They are all different,
which is why we can get few economies of scale. That's why we have
no intention of going to a single ERP system the only common
applications are Office and e-mail," he said.
The shared data centre centralises most of the hardware and
network infrastructure. The main suppliers are IBM for blade
servers that run VMWare and the Microsoft management toolset,
Hitachi for the storage network and AT&T for the wide area
network.
Hanna will give a full description of the project at the
10
December meeting of the Corporate IT Forum.