BT is planning to deploy an entirely virtualised environment across its global data centres.
According to the company's VP of Web21C, Stefan Van Overtveldt, BT's presence across the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions consists of 3 500 internal and 1 400 customer platforms served between its data centres.
The company declined to indicate the cost implications of a full virtual migration. However, Van Overtveldt says the return on investment so far has been good.
"Virtualising our data centres has already helped us with consolidating our servers and the eventual plan is to distribute work loads between our data centres, despite what region they are in," says Van Overtveldt. The process will also assist the company plan and manage its disaster recovery strategy, he says.
Some of the centres are already prepared for load-balancing, and Van Overtveldt admits there is still work to do before it will be ready. "We are experiencing latency periods when using an application across a geographical divide, however, we are working on how to alleviate that."
BT started consolidating through virtualisation in May last year and plans to complete the migration over the next two years. "All over the world, people are running out of physical space in data centres, and we are no different. Through the virtualisation process, we have managed to remove 1 800 racks."
Application migration
Van Overtveldt says the applications to that are being considered for migration have been categorised. "Some applications are extremely easy to migrate to a virtual environment, however, others are not at all suited."
Category one applications are easily to transfer, while category 10 applications represent legacy applications that cannot be moved, such as Cobol systems, he says. "We don't expect the move to be an easy one, but we are confident that what can be moved will be moved into our new infrastructure." BT's plan with legacy applications is to delete them after there has been no activity for over six months.
During this process, BT also plans to standardise the platforms it will be using inside its network.
"To be able to continue forward with a standardisation process, we have made it prohibitively expensive to purchase software or hardware outside a set framework."
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