Virtualisation Case Study
Capita cuts cost and improves performance with Virtualisation
Capita, a leading Life & Pension business process outsourcing and professional services company, has consolidated its server requirements using virtualisation technology from VMware. Capita has reduced its computer rooms from three to one, decreased disaster recovery costs by 10%, increased server usage from 15% to 80% and reduced overall total cost of ownership (TOC) by 30%.
DNM Technology is an independent IT infrastructure company who specialise in virtualisation, databases and intelligent data storage & management. Working with our customers we can provide virtual architecture design, implementation and support services through our Virtual Assurance services.
DNM Technology was asked by Capita to perform a complete review of their IT Infrastructure environment including Servers, Storage and Backup with a view to reducing operational costs.
Shaymus Kennedy, IT Infrastructure Manager, with Capita explains the rationale behind the move. "Dublin real estate is very expensive and we were rapidly running out of physical space. In addition, we had a significant ‘end-of-life’ environment, with many legacy applications running on NT. We were also under constant pressure to reduce our annual IT Operational costs. So therefore we wanted to reduce overall costs while maintaining legacy applications and improving performance. Only Virtualisation could offer us benefits on all three levels."
Together Capita and DNM installed the virtualisation solution running on Fujitsu Siemens servers and storage. A proof of concept rapidly delivered senior management buy-in and three weeks from the first green light, the first virtualisation solution was implemented.
DNM performed a complete analysis of Capita’s environment and designed a consolidated environment that delivered real performance gains and substantially reduced costs. Some of the key areas of the project were:
- Consolidation of all the Intel based server to a VMware based Farm
- Consolidation of the SPARC Solaris servers to more powerfully SPARC servers
- Removing expensive SAN solutions and replacing them with more flexible and cost effective Clariion based solutions from EMC
- Consolidation of the UNIX and Intel backups to a centralised Symantec NetBackup environment with a SAN Attached tape library
Kennedy advocates picking off a small project to begin with. "We identified a small project that gave us some wriggle room should there be problems. In this first project we successfully reduced 25 servers down to only eight. We needed a successful beginning as our culture does not tolerate downtime of any kind."
With the smooth installation behind the company, Kennedy uses hindsight to highlight lessons learnt in the process but planning is crucial according to him. "Virtualisation is a constantly changing technology so I advocate the use of experts – after all 80% of the process is in the design of the system," he says.
