Fund manager introduces virtualised server estate

Due for completion this summer, the virtualisation project will increase flexibility, cut running costs, via power reduction, by £75,000 over five years, and achieve a return on investment within three years. It will also mean Royal London Asset Management can have a new server up and running within the hour, whereas it used to take four to six weeks to procure a new server and significant man hours to install it.

“By working with Kelway to virtualise our servers, we will produce an environment that is fully flexible and future-proofed,” says 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,” continues 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.”

“We chose to work with Kelway on this project as they were by far the most knowledgeable about virtualisation of all the consultants we initially spoke with,” says Leeks. “Their VMware expertise and accreditations were also an important factor.”

In addition to the virtualisation project, Royal London Asset Management has also purchased a storage area network (SAN), enabling the storage of five terabytes of data on one physical device.