Virtualisation virgin pitfalls for the bottom line

Mike Bantick
Sunday, 27 July 2008 06:43

Business IT - Technology

There are many good reasons for companies to virtualise environments, but make sure you do your homework, planning and don’t believe everything consultants tell you.  A virtualisation case study of how to avoid cost blowouts follows.

The company in this case study may not be typical, but what is typical is that there is no typical company.  Does that make sense?

Company X has a medium sized presence in the financial industry within Australia, but is only the Asia Pacific arm of a much larger global entity.  X main offering is financial software services, the majority of which run on IBM Z series mainframes, housed in secure IBM managed data centres.

For some years however X has provided a browser based GUI (Graphical User Interface) front end to the mainframe application.

This system was traditionally not greatly resourced, and as such was plonked on three (Production, Prod backup and Development) X series servers.  Running Windows Server 2000 and IIS and housing all client web sites on a single box.

As time progressed, it became obvious that clients wanted to shift away from the traditional 3270 (green screen) access to the GUI offering.  Added to this pressure was the arrival of new Java based applications, adding to the X stable of software on offer to clients.  These applications ideally needed to be run in a Linux/Apache Tomcat environment.

As such, resources were given to spruce up the mid-range environment. So what happened?

Please read on to page 2.