VMware Cuts Provisioning Times and Reduces Risk at Alexander Forbes

Alexander Forbes, a leading provider of financial and risk services internationally has virtualized 40 percent of its operations on VMware's virtualisationplatform. The financial services player is in the final stages of implementing VMware's virtualization and management platform, VMware Infrastructure, as part of an enterprise-wide strategy to drive down IT costs and complexity, improve operational performance and mitigate business and IT risks. VMware solutions are being implemented across Alexander Forbes's offices including South Africa, Namibia, Kenya and the U. K.

Prior to adopting the VMware platform, the IT infrastructure at Alexander Forbes had become a bottleneck due to the lengthy time required to implement new IT hardware. Virtualization has reduced the time it takes to provision new servers by up to 97 percent - from weeks, or months, to days - because of the ease with which a virtual server can be deployed. Alexander Forbes expects this to have a major impact on its business units and department's ability to service and meet growth in their markets. Before implementing VMware Infrastructure, the company conducted rigorous research into the benefits of virtualization before choosing VMware because it offered the most mature and proven platform available.

Working with Dimension Data, a VMware Enterprise Partner, Alexander Forbes's Group IT team first implemented VMware in 2006 in its Windows development environment to prove that virtualization could improve the development process for key applications. Since then, in its production environment, the IT department has been able to achieve faster turnarounds in various areas of the business, which in the past would have taken weeks or months to initiate, but with VMware it took days. The company is confident that IT benefits will extend to its new products, significantly reducing its time-to-market

"VMware has made a significant impact on our business," said Andrew Geere, IT operations manager, Alexander Forbes. "Beyond reducing costs, improving project turnaround times and product time-to-market, we have seen reduced downtime and have built a dynamic recovery infrastructure which ensures business continuity and better management of our IT infrastructure."

According to Alexander Forbes, virtualizing their environment has assisted in managing hardware costs. They have also seen significant savings on power consumption and cooling, which is important at a time when South African electricity tariffs have increased by more than 20 percent, and may continue to do so in the future. They can now conduct infrastructure maintenance within office hours, which maintains workflow, mitigates the need for overtime and results in substantial cost savings as overtime costs and manpower are lessened.

Further benefits delivered by VMware Infrastructure include;

- Accelerated test and development cycles for new applications - the ability to clone environments in seconds means that effective testing can be scheduled and run without much downtime to any of its sites with minimal impact on the production schedule.

- Enhanced business continuity and disaster recovery efforts - in the event of hardware failure or power outages, data will automatically failover to a virtualized neighbour environment on another server. Once repaired, the device is recognised by the virtual environment and the system will return to its original status. This is critical in ensuring company information is protected and available for immediate access in the event of infrastructure failure.

.- Server and application consolidation - the ability to load multiple machines to a single host has allowed Alexander Forbes to better manage server and database sprawl. The company also recently completed an application consolidation initiative on virtual servers.

"IT departments across the globe need agile environments which improve the speed at which they are able to respond to the needs of customers and market conditions, and South Africa is no different," says Chris Norton, regional manager of VMware in South Africa. "VMware Infrastructure allows companies such as Alexander Forbes to meet this challenge whilst also allowing the business to better manage IT costs and reduce complexity. The ability to provision new IT resources rapidly and with resilience against the risk of hardware failure is very valuable to leading organisations like Alexander Forbes."