Virtualisation by stealth revamps IBM’s Australian Development Lab

Beverley Head
Friday, 07 August 2009 13:43

Business IT - Technology

Researchers at IBM’s Australian Development Lab had long resisted virtualisation, arguing it would prove too slow for their purposes. But when management virtualised the Lab’s development servers by stealth, those same researchers didn’t even notice, only learning of the change a fortnight ago.

IBM’s Australian Development Laboratory employs around 600 people, and had until recently a fleet of 1200 servers; “Some of them little, some of them bloody great mainframes,” according to Lab Services executive, Chris Farrow. “But our utilisation was running at about 5%, which was really scary.”

“We had provisioned for a maximum workload but for the most time they were not doing much at all. Effectively there were great halls of server rooms, consuming power but not doing much.”

It was a problem which prompted the Sydney laboratory’s core portal development team to experiment with virtualisation and cloud computing principles.

Farrow, speaking the SAP Australian User Group conference this week, said; “In the Australian Development Lab we have a core portal development team of 70 people and 140 servers.” Researchers had regularly demanded more servers be installed to keep pace with development demand; “Then along came the GFC and a freeze on capital spending,” said Farrow.

“All the researchers told me we couldn’t virtualise because it was too slow.” Over the last few months however the Lab has virtualised all its non production servers; “And no one noticed” said Farrow, adding that, “we only revealed this to them two weeks ago.”

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