Launching Our Virtualization Initiative

Launching our virtualization initiative

Our four original objectives were to achieve higher overall levels of server and storage utilization, minimize additional equipment purchases, reduce server sprawl and improve developer productivity. The initiative employed state-of-the-art service request management, hardware virtualization, and system monitoring technologies to manage server and storage assets on a pooled basis.

This approach created an in-house, on-demand, cloud computing environment for our R&D team and provided them with JIT access to the data center resources required to conduct product development projects.

We implemented IT Infrastructure Library Version 3 (ITIL V3) processes for capacity management, availability management, service level management and service reporting to obtain the maximum business benefits from the technologies deployed. These integrated management processes were linked to our hardware procurement procedures to ensure that excess server and storage capacity is available to satisfy developer requests.

For individual projects, developers typically require eight to 10 discrete environments that consist of multiple servers and storage volumes. Without this provisioning capability, more than 100 development projects being conducted concurrently on a worldwide basis could be adversely impacted by delays in server and storage availability.