Virtualisation has been embraced by the financial services industry, but users are adopting it at different rates and approaching migration with caution.

Virtualisation has joined the list of projects that will be protected during times of cost containment, said Andrew Gordon, technical infrastructure manager at insurance group Standard Life.

“The economic climate and increasing power costs have emphasised the importance of doing more on virtual platforms. Virtualisation began as a niche tool to try to manage cost on server expansion, and has become the de facto standard for how we deploy servers, and we will need more of that to improve server management and control costs,” said Gordon.

Standard Life has been a VMware customer since 2004 and has cut a quarter of its 400 servers after overcoming challenges linked to network resilience and production management.

“That was an initial concern in the sense that if we had a physical failure, several departments would be affected. We mitigated that by giving thought to how we managed workloads on servers,” said Gordon.

“We did not take a traditional approach in terms of running development and test workloads. We ran production loads from day one, so there was a resilience leap of faith there,” he said.

Lloyds TSB said it would not virtualise certain applications because of system differences, legacy infrastructure and vendor support.

“There will always be situations were you can’t use virtualisation, but it is a technology that makes business sense,” said Lloyds TSB solutions architect Steve Curling.

“And we plan to use virtualisation as much as possible, including mission-critical systems, as a lot of the functionality behind the products lies in keeping such systems up and running,” he said.

Not all businesses have decided to go down the same route. Regulatory pressures and the possible consequences of system downtime have driven firms such as F&C Asset Management to test all applications prior to going into production on a virtualised environment.

F&C has more than £100bn of assets under management. It is using vendor PlateSpin to run functionality testing of more than 450 applications supporting its business. The group intends to virtualise half of its server infrastructure by the end of next year.

“At the time we got this product there was no alternative, as the likes of VMware could not do live migration the way PlateSpin does,” said F&C’s technical architect Kevin McGuire.

“We had to pick what was available at the time, but if we had to wait for everyone to do what was needed, we would not move forward. Choosing this option has paid off.

“The IT industry is full of hype and what we have seen is that virtualisation isn’t a hype, it is an actual benefit. But we are approaching it in a steady manner and measuring the benefits against cost along the way.”

Risk assessment

• Users are now more carefully examining physical risk and management issues associated with virtualisation.
• Twelve per cent of 650 users surveyed now agree that virtualisation means increased physical risk to their server setup.
• New tools are emerging to manage multi-vendor environments.
• Now that organisations have deployed virtualisation, they are starting to look at management as an issue.