Virtualization is the Right Call for Growth

Challenge
For more than 12 years, Genco, a financial services firm has kept IT operations entirely in-house hosting all applications and infrastructure in its own data center. Although the company has met its profit targets, future growth objectives rely on acquisitions rather than organic growth.  But company executives know that the path to successful acquisition involves IT readiness and seamless integration, issues which alone could dampen the attractiveness of the acquisition route.

Meanwhile Genco was pressured by internal IT challenges as well. Disparate storage systems were becoming more frequent. Storage had grown organically by project, and it was not managed in terms of cost. They had eight NAS [Network Attached Storage] appliances none of which could talk to each other. Moreover, with up to 40 dedicated servers and 10 more servers projected over the next two years, the physical footprint of Genco’s data center was limiting at best and related energy and cooling costs would surpass the hardware cost in less than two years.

As a result Genco began looking at several options to outsource some or all of its data center and infrastructure applications and streamline their NASs. This plan would enable Genco to restructure and modernize IT systems while enabling it to commence its acquisition plan.

Penta Solution
Being a VMWare VIP Solutions partner, Penta immediately began investigating ways to use server virtualization to cluster Genco’s servers. In addition, Penta could leverage its business continuity plan to mirror the entire server environment to a secondary data center. The secondary site would be in “ready-state” mode to activate immediately in case of a system failure. Genco executives soon agreed that virtualization would be the optimal route to managing growth, enhancing server availability and ensuring an added benefit of seamless disaster recovery.

With Genco’s approval, Penta virtualized Genco’s 40 servers and ran them all on a cluster of Three HP x64 DL-360 2 x quad core servers, each with 48GB of memory and running VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) software.  Penta’s data center in Geneva was chosen as the primary site with a mirrored disaster recovery [DR] environment in Zurich . In addition, Penta consolidated Genco’s eight NASs into one SAN [Storage Area Network], reducing management costs, enabling asynchronous replication with the DR site and allowing more efficient data utilization. The data availability and hardware resilience was enhanced from 99.8% to 99.999% whilst the cost per Megabyte decreased significantly.

Results                                      
After successful implementation of server virtualization, Genco transformed its IT infrastructure into a lean, outsourced environment without compromising performance, along with 45 percent reduction of its power and cooling costs. Best of all, Genco could now explore the feasibility of an acquisition target by testing system integration through a virtual machine. Previously, if Genco needed a test server, it took three days for their technology staff to setup and provision a physical server with the correct CPU, memory and network connection. With their new virtual machines, Genco can run a new server in production in less than four hours. 

Lessons Learned
By leveraging Penta’s expertise in virtualization and SAN storage solutions, companies can dramatically reduce their cost of IT infrastructure and gain the added benefit of systems availability, enterprise redundancy and disaster recovery.

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