Standard Life goes virtual

Standard Life has found server virtualisation an effective way of improving its IT services while controlling costs.

The assurance company took the decision to virtualise its computer servers following a strategic review carried out in 2004.

The Edinburgh-based group provides assurance services such as banking, pensions and healthcare, and floated on the stock market about a year ago.

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Speaking at a recent event in London, Andrew Gordon, technical infrastructure manager at Standard Life, explained how the company had been keen to improve its IT services without recruiting additional staff or incurring greater costs - meaning virtualisation fit the bill.

Since switching more than half of its servers to a VMware virtual environment, the company has seen significant gains, he said.

Gordon said virtualisation has lowered IT costs, improved business continuity and disaster recovery and simplified acquisitions.

Big savings were realised because less time is needed for rolling out virtual servers than for traditional servers. For instance, consolidating servers previously took 10 to 15 days but the switch to the virtualised servers took just 30 minutes per server.

The way in which virtualisation allows computing resources to be pooled between servers has also made management of Standard Life's IT infrastructure much easier, Gordon added.

He said: "We were very much in a one application, one server scenario. We needed to improve the service we delivered internally."

Virtualisation even helped simplify the IT changeover for a recent acquisition, SL Healthcare. As part of the acquisition, SL moved premises and the virtualisation technology made this a much simpler task by removing the need to set up new servers on site.

According to Gordon, Standard Life now plans to use virtualisation to facilitate on-demand services.