BT virtualising its data centres

Virtualisation technology is playing a core role in reducing BT Global Services' global data centre costs by half.

Having already deployed its virtual data centre (VDC) concept to 11 of its 58 data centres around the world, Stefan Overtveldt, BT Global Services vice president and head of IT transformation practice, said the ongoing work and savings would also ultimately help it serve its business customers better.

"By deploying the concept of virtual data centre, we can look at our server and storage capacity as one whole unit and use it to expand throughput, standby capacity, failover capabilities and other requirements for our own business and for those of our customers," Overtveldt told delegates to VMware's first European conference.

He said VDC first became attractive when BT began to run out of data centre space at the same time as the management of its 3,500 internal and 1,400 customer platforms - made up of applications, operating systems and an average of 10 servers each - became increasingly complex.

BT developed a classic server consolidation strategy in response, which relied on deploying virtualisation technologies of VMware and its competitors in the data centres to reduce its reliance on multiple physical servers. In doing so, it was able to take advantage of the dynamic provisioning capabilities running a virtual infrastructure within a standardised, distributed environment can offer at the same time.

"The next logical step was to tie our data centres together in a 'meshed data centre' state that allows us to load balance applications, not just across each data centre or ones that are geographically linked, but across the world to enable a truly self-healing IT infrastructure," said Overtveldt.

As a result of its VDC programme, he said BT can now begin to offset the constraints of local compute capacity and resource planning to increase IT service delivery both internally and to its enterprise customers.

"It also allows up to develop new applications like proximity trading, for instance, where the increasing reliance on electronic trading platforms by the financial services industry means we can execute in close proximity to where the trades are actually taking place to reduce latency and guarantee service levels," he added.

BT will spend the next year rolling its VDC programme out to its remaining data centres, but has redeployed more than 900 platforms on those it has already completed.

Overtveldt concluded: "We managed to reduce our overall costs by 50 per cent and the time it takes to provision new server, storage and network capacity down to hours from days. And our model of extreme standardisation means any new internal application requirements outside of the virtual data centres have to have a strong business case first."

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