Royal London Asset Management
(RLAM), part of Royal London Mutual, is a fund management firm
responsible for around £30bn of client assets.
The firm has turned to virtualisation to
cut costs and make IT efficiencies.
RLAM started looking at the concept of
virtualisation at the beginning of 2008 as the firm's IT
manager Dennis Leeks attended seminars on the subject.
"I realised we had experienced a lot of growth over the last two
to three years as a company, and we were buying a number of new
servers for specific applications," said Leeks.
As a result, RLAM's IT department was quickly running out of
rack space, as well as facing growing problems with its air
conditioning.
"The number of servers was putting a real strain on the air
conditioning, and it failed a couple of times last year," said
Leeks.
As he investigated virtualisation as a way of consolidating rack
space, he began to develop a broader business case, with the help
of Panacea Services, a
virtualisation consultancy to city-based companies.
The VMWare consultancy helped Leeks to make the business case to
RLAM's chief executive officer, who had to sign off the
virtualisation programme.
The main attraction for the chief executive was the green
computing aspect.
"In implementing the technology, and virtualising over 20
servers, we worked out we would save the equivalent of 6,600 trees,
which is equivalent to taking 300 cars off the road in terms of
carbon output," explained Leeks.
The plan also showed
how RLAM could cut IT costs from consolidating applications
onto fewer physical servers. For example, the technology would
allow RLAM to consolidate three database servers onto one, reducing
licensing requirements and producing immediate cost savings.
"We looked at the costs quite carefully, and estimated a return
on investment in three years, and a saving of £75,000 in five
years.
"The attractive thing from my perspective is that it's purely an
IT project which gives us a return on investment without me having
to cut IT staff," said Leeks.
In addition, the firm would be able to introduce more efficient
disaster recovery.
"By taking advantage of the benefits that a virtualised
infrastructure will give us, we calculated that we should be able
to recover servers in a matter of hours, much quicker than
before."
Virtualisation also gives RLAM a more flexible environment to
support future growth. The firm has gone through three acquisitions
in the past few years, and having a virtualised IT system would
make integrating systems from other companies much easier, Leeks
argued.
Server provisioning is also faster with virtualisation, with
Leeks estimating it will take half a day, as opposed to several
days, to bring new servers online.
We can create identical servers to the live ones, on the fly,
which means our testing can be much more stringent, and recovery on
a file and sever level are both faster, which reduces downtime," he
added.
The chief executive signed off the business case for VMWare in
August 2008, and the firm has now embarked on the road to
virtualisation. In September, Leeks put his four infrastructure
technicians into training for VMWare, and began to implement a new
storage area network.
The programme is now underway, and aims to virtualise in excess
of 20 server applications.
This includes a core front-office portfolio management system
called thinkFolio, which is
supported by VMWare.
"It is a highly intensive, high usage trading and analytics
application. But we will only virtualise it when we are fully
comfortable."
Other server applications that are being virtualised include
Outlook Web Access, Windows Terminal Services, Sharepoint Portal
Server and a 50-user BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
Leeks is also planning to virtualise the firm's 180 user seat
Microsoft Exchange Server.
"The difficulty there is that there will have to be some
downtime, and users won't like that," he commented. Another key
server will be the file and print server, which Leeks plans to
virtualise in February 2009.
The plan is to complete the virtualisation programme by the end
of March, by which time all but six servers will be running on
VMWare.