Real stories of virtualisation
Published: 10 Aug 2006 13:15 BST
Standard Life: Extraordinary technology
The organisation, which is based in Edinburgh, is one of the UK's largest financial services companies, providing banking, pensions, life and private medical insurance. After starting the process in March 2004, Standard Life de-mutualised and floated on the London Stock Exchange in July 2006 and currently manages about £119bn in assets on behalf of seven million customers worldwide.
The company started its consolidation initiative in 2000 in a bid to reduce server sprawl. Ewan Ferguson, technical project manager for the firm's 500-strong Information Systems Operational Services group, explains the rationale: "Our servers had grown in number for 20 years or so on an ad hoc basis and we were starting to find them difficult to manage. We had pretty much one application per server and, while our headquarters are in Edinburgh, we had about 20 offices across the UK, so there were storage and remote-management issues."
To help combat this server sprawl, Standard Life decided on a strategy based around a number of consolidation "streams". The first involved opening a second data centre as a disaster-recovery site and moving the majority of the organisation's Intel servers into it — although others did remain in branch offices. At the same time, the decision was taken to standardise on common hardware, operating systems, security and patch-management software.
The next step in 2002 was to introduce a storage area network, initially to handle file and print services, although application support was added at a later date. But by 2004, says Ferguson: "We entered a strategic review to prepare for de-mutualisation, with the aim of improving both efficiency and our service-delivery capabilities. We were looking at streamlining workflows and moving from running one application per server to running multiple ones, and so virtualisation came into focus."
On analysing its server estate, which was in the "low hundreds", the organisation found that 70 percent of its machines were exploiting less than 10 percent of CPU capacity and less than 30 percent of memory. On further evaluation, it became clear that 70 percent of the estate consisted of "good candidates for virtualisation".
Good candidates included machines that were not making efficient use of resources. These included servers that were not running network-hungry applications, or making high demands on disk input/output such as large transaction-processing packages or databases.
Another consideration was whether the application vendors were prepared to provide support for packages running on virtualised software. "For one or two of the applications, we had to make a judgement call from a performance and cost-benefit analysis standpoint as to whether it was a good move," Ferguson says. "We had a few where, in a worst-case scenario, the vendor wouldn't have supported us and we could have done a reverse migration, but that was part of the risk analysis from the start and, as it turns out, we haven't had to do a single migration back."
By late 2004, having looked at all the different flavours of virtualisation software, Standard Life opted for VMware's ESX Server. "We'd done a lot of preparation before the roll-out. We had a pretty good handle on the hardware in our estate and we'd looked at reference sites and talked to other companies about lessons learned. We'd also put in a pilot to test the environment and see what virtualisation ratio we could get and how stable the environment was," Ferguson explains.
That virtualisation or server-consolidation ratio worked out at 13 machines to one, which has "significantly" cut operational costs, including power consumption and maintenance. For example, because the company can now deploy applications to run in virtual machines rather than having to provide dedicated hardware for each one, it has been able to increase the number of instances of application server software it uses while reducing the number of physical boxes that they run on.
This radical change in server deployment means that while in January 2005 there were 370 application servers running on 370 physical machines, a year later some 535 were able to operate on 350 physical servers.
"We're making a better use of our investment because as the estate continues to grow, we don't have to increase our investment in hardware. We're now exploiting about 70 to 80 percent of the CPU capacity of our machines rather than 10 percent, and we can deliver services more quickly," Ferguson says.
As a result, while IT's service-level agreements used to mean that it had to deploy a new service in 15 days, this is now generally possible within hours, as it is no longer necessary to involve four separate delivery teams in the process.
Disaster-recovery provision has likewise become more effective. "As virtualisation software is hardware-independent, you have more flexibility to move services from host to host and from one data centre to another. For example, one of our SAN-attached servers, which hosted 20 guests, went down a while ago and, although there was an impact, it wasn't a major headache," Ferguson says.
Another host at the disaster recovery data centre was up and running in less than an hour, and: "Although we may have had an outage, it took much less time to restore services than if we'd had to replace an entire server".
Standard Life uses its virtualisation software mainly to run testing and development servers and for infrastructure functions such as DNS, domain controllers, security and patch distribution. Large databases and other mission-critical applications, however, still run on their own dedicated hardware.
"Virtualisation has become a strategic technology for us. It's about ensuring a better use of the investment that we've already made and gaining efficiencies in terms of scalability and improved functionality, so it's become the default in the Intel space for us," concludes Ferguson.
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