Royal London Asset Management, a fund management company, says it will save £75,000 in the next three years thanks to its use of virtualisation to help consolidate physical servers from 35 to eight.
RLAM says it anticipates return on investment (ROI) within three years.
RLAM is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Royal London Mutual Insurance Society and manages £29bn of assets from its City site. The business has 180 end users and two server rooms, which previously held 35 servers. However, the site has limited space and would soon have run out of capacity for additional servers – limiting the potential for business growth.
Working with reseller Kelway and technology from VMware, the London-based firm has embarked on a virtualisation project using VMware ESX software that will reduce its total number of physical servers from 35 to eight. This will deliver significant cost savings from power reduction, delivering ROI within three years and saving the organisation £75,000 over five years, it claimed.
It also allows the company increased flexibility and manageability as procuring a new server previously took four to six weeks and significant time. Now, a new server can be up and running in an hour.
“By working with Kelway to virtualise our servers, we will produce an environment that is fully flexible and future-proofed,” said Dennis Leeks, IT manager at RLAM. “We intend to reduce the number of physical servers by almost three quarters, which will provide us with room to grow and support future business development as well as delivering significant cost savings.”
“The flexibility of procuring a new server in an hour means we can be much more agile as a department and support the rest of the business in a more responsive way,” said Leeks. “In today’s climate, businesses need to be able to make quick decisions in order to remain competitive and IT needs to have the infrastructure in place to support those decisions.”
Leeks said the firm had also purchased a new storage area network (SAN), which he said will enable the storage of five terabytes of data on a single physical device.
