Irish Life & Permanent in virtualisation deal

16 Jan 2009

Financial services firm Irish Life & Permanent has signed a deal with VirtualizeIT to consolidate up to 550 physical servers into a single virtualisation platform.

The move is intended to dramatically reduce utility, management, capital expenditure and support costs for the organisation, whilst bringing greater capability in the provision of IT services to the organisation.

After an extensive review of competitive offerings, Irish Life & Permanent chose VirtualizeIT because of its experience in delivering strategic virtualisation projects.

As well as providing significant cost savings to the organisation, the project will produce significant environmental benefits. There will be an extensive reduction of Irish Life & Permanent’s CO2 emissions as utility demands of the proposed IT infrastructure will be greatly reduced when compared to its current IT estate.

“We entered into the process with a clear vision: to select the best advisor in the field of consolidation, process improvement and optimisation,” Stephen Oxley, Windows Services Manager, Group IT, Irish Life & Permanent, explained.

“What we have identified in VirtualizeIT is a combination of demonstrable expertise and the flexibilty to partner to our exacting requirements.”

In terms of the design and implementation detail, VirtualizeIT have been selected to advise on server virtualisation and consolidation that will reduce Irish Life & Permanent’s physical server footprint across their two data centres.

The project will transform the way Irish Life & Permanent’s IT team interact with their infrastructure through a comprehensive operational readiness program and will bring greater flexibility and agility when responding to the organisation’s IT demands.

 “Irish Life & Permanent is a major force in the Irish financial market and as such have a large and complex infrastructure,” Julian Box, Managing Director, VirtualizeIT commented, “so the project has thrown up some interesting challenges which the team have been able to respond to through consultation and partnership.

“It’s an area we have a great deal of expertise within having carried out multiple strategic virtualisation projects, including recently the largest project to date within Ireland,” Box said.

By John Kennedy

Caption: Julian Box, managing director, VirtualizeIT and Stephen Oxley, Windows services manager, Group IT, Irish Life & Permanent

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com