Lessons Learned from Move

to Virtualization"> "We wanted to best optimize what we had as quickly as possible. We wanted it to support high availability and disaster recovery, and so we went with a virtualization solution that included IBM System z9 running SUSE Linux 9," Woeckener said.

While Nationwide expected to save $15 million in the first three years, "I can tell you we are already ahead of that," Woeckener said. These savings came from a 50 percent reduction in monthly Web hosting costs; an 80 percent reduction in data center floor space; a 50 percent reduction in hardware and operating system support efforts; a 70 percent average CPU utilization; and significant savings on its middleware costs, WebSphere, UDB and Oracle. "The move has also resulted in a significantly faster server provisioning speed, the dynamic allocation of computer power, simple and robust high availability, and disaster recovery," Woeckener said. But Woeckener also shared some of the lessons Nationwide had learned from the move and encouraged those considering doing this to have clear goals and directions as well as support from senior management for this. "It is also necessary to do a complete TCO to realize the full benefits. Significant adoption requires good economic incentives for the application teams, with good enforcement and technology enforcement," Woeckener said. While skills were also easily transferable from distributed environments, the billing model needed to be refined to include fixed and consumption-based costs. "Also, do not underestimate the mental shift needed by the applications teams," Woeckener said. Ken Simon, the vice president of sales for Enterico, a division of Continental Resources, said that it had migrated a significant number of old applications onto Linux as well as written new ones for the platform. p>To read more about how Sybase ported its data mirroring system to Oracle, click here. "To us, virtualization is optimizing resources and allowing us to effectively and efficiently migrate legacy applications. Linux is a platform that offers reliability and growth, while facilitating legacy application migration and new application development," Simon said. Michael Kane of Sybase said the company had grown up on Wall Street, providing mission-critical database technology. Wall Street trading volumes had increased by up to 3,000 percent over the past three years, with computers now making and executing these trades. As such, Sybase had developed a risk analytic platform that was designed to improve profitability and reduce risk. "With data virtualization, we are able to consolidate this data [and] eliminate fragmented data and information lag. Core to this was Sybase IQ, a highly optimized analytics server designed to deliver ultra-high-speed reporting and intelligence data," Kane said. Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.