Virtualization eases bank's updates, reduces downtime

It could take an army of system administrators to constantly update and upgrade the IT systems that support Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco and its many branches and offices throughout the western U.S. But even an IT army couldn't do those things without disrupting the performance of the bank's 300 employees, thousands of customers, 225 servers and $60 billion in revenue exchanges.

Rather than put his IT army of about 100 people to work fighting fires caused by system changes, Mike Bedford, the bank's senior systems architect, sought and found a virtualization technology to do it for them. He then discovered that virtualization helped reduce manpower demands and costs in many other ways. In this two-part interview, he describes the switch to virtualization and its results.

This story will help explain the uses and scope of virtualization software such as VMware in the enterprise.

For the full story, click Here!

You can also find a companion article on Server Virtualization by clicking Here!