Focus on… Servers

"We essentially got three servers for the price of one," said Clive Cranshaw, technical administrator at Royal London. "When you factor in the cost of the individual servers, database licences and other software, we estimate savings of nearly $200,000 (136,000)."

The server is configured in a Virtual Server Environment including three integrity VM guest systems and is managed using HP OpenView Operations for UNIX.

This new set-up enables Royal London's customer support staff to easily access the two main applications Integro and Oryx needed to provide information to policyholders.

Royal London's server virtualisation implementation started to bear fruits almost immediately. It now has much greater flexibility and can better handle fluctuating workloads. For example, the system has been set up so that CPU resources automatically respond to increased workloads on the system.

"We saw right away how resources in the Virtual Server Environment, such as memory and CPU, were no longer fixedthat we could start allocating them in a much more granular way," said Paul Briddon, Royal London's UNIX and storage technical consultant.

"So, the users get consistently high performance without ever knowing anything is happening behind the scenes. It's all very fluid we don't have to get involved at all."