One of the major stumbling blocks preventing companies moving to a comprehensive public cloud platform is the level of investment in their hardware.
Companies who have committed tens (or hundreds) of thousands of pounds in investing in a particular range of technology are not going to be too happy about casting that investment to one side while it embarks on a completely different path and signs up as a customer of a cloud service provider.
However, there are plenty of companies who will be attracted by the advantages of cloud computing - its flexibility, the ability to reduce costs and the means to streamline a business – that they will be looking for ways.
Leading law firm RPC is a company that it is looking to make such a move but went through the very important intermediate step of introducing a private cloud-based data centre first.
Like many organisations, the City law firm was looking to introduce virtualisation as a means of consolidating the servers in its data centre and to cut the electricity bill. After examining the options, RPC took the step of going with hypervisor market leader VMware, ahead of Microsoft’s Hyper V.
According to RPC’s head of IT, Craig Hawthorne, the rationale for the choice was the fact that VMware was far ahead of the competition when it came to management capability. “Going with Microsoft meant having to opt for more complex management solution. VMware offered much better management capability,” he says.
Having decided to go for VMware, the next choice was which servers to go for. The company evaluated three companies: HP, IBM and Cisco before eventually plumping for HP’s Blade Matrix server to support VMware and SQL Server.
Again, it seemed the obvious choice. “We have being using HP servers and storage for a long time already,” says Hawthorne. “And that obviously helped but it seemed a better choice all round. We did look very closely at the Cisco UCS but we felt that Cisco wasn’t a mature enough product.”
It wasn’t only RPC’s experience with HP that was the deciding factor, however, Hawthorne said that the product was much better suited for an environment of RPC’s size. The company, which has a good reputation for its insurance and corporate work, has about 450 employees but, as yet, has few services that are accessible by its clients.
The new servers are the first steps towards a move to a public cloud platform. Hawthorne says that the new infrastructure will provide the company with the ability to move services to a hosted cloud infrastructure. “New systems will be assessed for cloud suitability,” says Hawthorne.
The company has made no plans as yet to appoint a cloud service provider “We’ll have a cloud partner in the next three years,” says Hawthorne, “but we will continually review the market to confirm who this will be.”
Despite, the long term plans to move to cloud, the company has not been dipping its toes into the SaaS world. The company has several customised applications that it uses, on-premise, software such as document management and practice management are set to remain as on-premise software. RPC does have some cloud involvement though: the company uses an email security partner for its email services.
To prepare the ground, the company is slowing transforming its IT infrastructure. The move towards virtualisation and the installation of the HP Blade Matrix system took place in November last year and has already driven greater efficiencies within RPC.
The company has been able to generate standard server profiles which have helped to speed up the provisioning of servers. “For example, if a developer asks for a test server environment we can quickly give him one.
The systems is also far more resilient says Hawthorne. “We have a two chassis infrastructure, which we’ll continue to expand on. We don’t have system failures,” he adds.
It’s not just the greater hardware resilience that's important. “We’re also much more aware of bottlenecks,” he says, “Thanks to HP monitoring software, we’re aware of problems much more quickly and can fix them as soon as they happen,” he says.
RPC is a company that is looking forward to the future. By moving to a virtualised environment, powered by HP blade servers, it’s already taking the first steps towards cloud computing and is ready to transform its business over the next few years.
