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Amatica has completed implementation of its server virtualisation project for customer Birmingham Midshires. The project has been undertaken as part of Amatica's managed hosting service provided to the mortgage and savings specialist, now part of the Lloyds Banking Group. The newly re-designed web server infrastructure supports Birmingham Midshires' mortgage intermediary portal BMSolutions.co.uk and its consumer retail savings and mortgages website askBM.co.uk.

In summary, server virtualisation offers the ability to establish virtual environments on physical hardware that is independent of the actual server hardware. The benefits are realised through reducing the technical and change management effort required when adding new web services and applications as well as replacing server hardware that has come to the end of its lifespan. Establishing new web services and moving existing services and applications becomes significantly easier with additional benefits through reducing downtime and improving resilience. The new virtualisation service enables Amatica to rapidly copy and deploy environments for development, test and live operational running.

Kevin Lawrence, Amatica's technical manager who led the project has enthusiastically adopted this new technology. "At Amatica, we tend to be reserved about the claims of the latest exciting new technology. It's often more costly and less reliable than the proponents would have you believe. But server virtualisation has reached a level of reliability that its benefits could be seriously considered."

With all IT projects, the devil is in the preparation and detail and server virtualisation is no different. "A detailed plan with timescales was drawn up and shared with Birmingham Midshires. This preparation was rewarded as the transfer of each web service from the old hardware servers went exactly according to plan. The whole project went even better than expected." says Kevin Lawrence. 

The successful completion of this project means that adding new hardware and web application services becomes extremely easy to accommodate, with resulting reductions in implementation time, disruption and downtime. It also makes the whole process significantly faster with similar reductions in risk.

Amatica has since implemented server virtualisation across all its managed hosting infrastructure used to support its customers in local government, financial services and other professional organisations.

© Amatica 07/04/2009