Fidelity Standardizing, Virtualizing Data Center
August 18, 2008
Fidelity is expanding its three-year-old plan to “virtualize,” or standardize, its servers—so that there no longer is great a bond between data, applications, desktops and storage, and the underlying server and operating system infrastructure— focusing on both x86 and reduced-instruction-set computing, or RISC, servers, Network World reports.
“When you scale infrastructure, historically it was built to be as [powerful] as the highest-performing application needed,” Brady said. “Now we’re looking at providing several different options of performance.”
The old model of dedicating storage-area networks to individuals services is “not nearly as efficient as when you dynamically change storage pools server by server,” Brady explained.
Another key goal is to standardize systems, rather than constantly adopting best-of-breed.
“Today, an application has so many hooks into an operating system and a platform, that maintenance has to be done concurrently, [making it] a very complex, time-consuming process,” he continued. “By applying a hypervisor, even if we have one application on one box, we provide optimized service management.”
The end result should be much more efficient usage of the desktops that Fidelity runs, which outnumber its 40,000 employees. So, rather than leaving them and their supporting servers on all of the time, much like leaving a light bulb on for 24 hours, 365 days of the week, Fidelity will be making far better use of its technology spending, Brady said.
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