Capita, a leading business process outsourcing and professional services company, has consolidated its server requirements using virtualization technology.  Capita has reduced its computer rooms from three to one, decreased disaster recovery costs by 10 percent, increased server usage from 15percent to 80 percent and reduced overall total cost of ownership (TOC) by 30 percent.

Shaymus Kennedy, title, with Capita explains the rationale behind the move.  “As a company we pride ourselves on our early adopter approach.  We first began looking at the benefits of Virtualisation back in 2003.  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 wanted to reduce overall costs while maintaining legacy applications and improving performance.  Only Virtualisation could offer us benefits on all three levels.”

Virtualisation in IT refers to technologies designed to provide a layer of abstraction between computer hardware systems and the software running on them.  Virtualisation provides a logical rather than a physical view of computing resources that allows multiple operating systems to run on the same machine as well as forcing the operating systems to address a group of servers is a single pool of resources.

“We had reached a crunch point,” says Kennedy.  We had to manage our TCO, Yet at the same time we wanted to improve our services to our customers by offering them remote desktop environment and support.  With our technology partner, DNM Technology, we analysed our environment and chose VMware as our virtualisation solution.”

Together Capita and DNM installed the virtualisation solution running on Fujitsu Siemens HW and Clarion Storage device.  A proof of concept was created first to obtain senior management buy-in and three weeks from the first green light, the first virtualisation solution was implemented.

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 percent of the process is in the design of the system,” he says.

Virtualisation is a fast becoming a mainstream technology with some 72% of today’s U.S. companies with 10,000-plus employees using server virtualisation.  The figure is also high at 67% for smaller companies (with between 1000 and 9999 employees).  The technology is not limited to non-core applications as 50% of today’s virtual servers support production workloads (everyday business apps and core IT infrastructure).  Finally, at a recent IDC Directions 2007 conference it was estimated that at least 15% of enterprise IT groups are creating a “virtual computing team” to manage future developments.

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