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Home Vision Financial issue 04 Virtualisation takes off at BAA

Virtualisation takes off at BAA

Find out how a Virtual Datacenter solution has helped airport operator, BAA, unlock financial and efficiency savings

An agile IT infrastructure is fundamental for maximising new business opportunities and driving change.

Although server virtualisation enables the rapid provisioning of additional computing resources, this is just one part of the agility equation – which also includes storage, networks and automation. To unlock the full flexibility of IT, organisations need to expand virtualisation beyond the server racks.  

An end-to-end approach to virtualisation will not only increase business agility but also significantly decrease operational and capital expenditure. For example, BAA has been able make savings of £1.8 million and reduce server-provisioning times from four weeks to one day by implementing a Virtual Datacenter (VDC) solution in partnership with Computacenter.

Virtualising workloads versus individual devices

VDCs combine a number of pre-architected virtualisation technologies with software management tools that have been optimised to simplify deployment, management and reduce total cost of ownership.

Neill Burton, Solutions Director, Datacenter from Computacenter, comments: “One of the main challenges in IT today is that solutions are still deployed in silos. VDC turns this on its head by taking an holistic approach, moving away from looking at individual layers, such as the storage layer, networking layer, or server layer and instead looks at the whole stack. It’s a refocusing of attention on workloads, rather than point technology solutions.”

One of the biggest hurdles when planning and deploying a VDC solution is legacy applications. As Neill Burton explains: “Many organisations have a large number of legacy systems that run business-critical tasks. However, not all of these applications will operate efficiently in a VDC environment - failing to recognise this could be a problem.”

Laying the VDC foundations

Before deciding on which workloads to virtualise, companies must first understand their current datacenter systems, their criticality and the interdependencies between them.

Computacenter helped BAA achieve this visibility by combining an automated discovery process with a physical audit and IT team interviews. VMware’s Capacity Planner tool was then used to identify a candidate list of services to be virtualised as well as plan the migration of these workloads to the VDC environment.

Terry Fusco, Head of IT for Heathrow at BAA, comments: “To maximise business agility and continuity, we decided to virtualise the network as well as our server estate and incorporate disaster recovery facilities in the environment.”

With critical workloads and applications, such as invoicing systems, databases and CCTV footage hosted within the new VDC, availability and performance is essential.

After installing the physical infrastructure and migrating the selected workloads, Computacenter conducted rigorous testing of the environment, including full site failover and recovery.

Increased business agility and continuity

The VDC at BAA went live in May 2010 – on time and with no disruption to business operations. “The project has been recognised as a resounding success throughout BAA, and has a predicted return on investment of less than 24 months,” comments Fusco.

Automation is one of the significant cost-saving elements in a VDC, removing much of the complexity from service desk and provisioning tasks.

For BAA, automation has also enhanced business agility and continuity with the IT team now able to move workloads between virtual machines and virtual servers without the need for manual reconfiguration.

BAA’s VDC solution also includes real-time data replication between two datacenters, which means the airport operator can recover automatically from a total site outage in minutes.

“The environment in which we operate is continually evolving. In order to keep up with business change, we needed an IT infrastructure that offered greater flexibility,” comments Terry. “By virtualising our production systems we have been able to make a significant contribution to the company’s strategic goals for IT simplification and cost reduction while achieving greater business agility and IT performance, which is critical to the running of BAA’s airports.”

Read the full BAA case study here

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