Among the many industries benefiting from new technologies such as virtualisation and cloud computing is the finance industry, with more banks across the UK seeing the advantages of outsourcing their IT infrastructure.
Banking on saving a net of £8 million from IT and energy costs, building society Nationwide recently announced it would work to virtualise 500 servers in its system. Savings for the firm will come from the consolidation of hardware assets by removing old hardware, and increasing the efficiency of existing physical servers.
Virtualisation – where multiple servers can be run off one physical unit – contributes to a lessened need for hardware space by companies. These initiatives also help to cut energy costs and contribute to a ‘greener’ approach to technology solutions.
As reported by Computer Weekly, the financial company has already consolidated an average of 12 servers onto each physical machine. Given this current rate, Nationwide should be able to whittle down its existing 500 servers to under 50, slashing its numbers by over 90 per cent.
“This reduction has not only saved space within the datacentre but has also significantly contributed to a decreased carbon footprint through a reduction in power and air-conditioning usage,” the company said.
The building society has inked a deal to move to SAP service-oriented architecture technology under a comprehensive £300 million transformation initiative to improve its business practices. Nationwide has also confirmed it will launch a voice and data convergence programme for its operations.
Nationwide has assets of over £200 billion as of April 2009 and over 13 million customers, and is the largest building society in the UK. By employing virtualisation solutions to such notable effect, it is expected to inspire other companies across the finance industry to look into the technology themselves
Source:http://www.rackspace.co.uk/rackspace-home/media-centre/news/article/article/banks-can-make-savings-through-virtualisation/?tx_ttnews[backPid]=63&cHash=0a9ebdd221
