Virtualization Is Virtually Everywhere on Wall Street
Wall Street is becoming a virtual world. In a survey of financial firm IT executives conducted by Platform Computing in December, 54 percent of participants said they consider virtualization "the infrastructure priority for 2009."
That caught our attention. Most of the large firms in Platform Computing's realm already use virtualization software and techniques fairly extensively. Why would they point to virtualization -- roughly, the sharing of hardware among operating systems, applications and users, rather than dedicating a single server to run one OS or application, or an entire CPU to one user -- a priority for the coming year?
Well, in this era of reduced technology budgets and IT layoffs combined with market turmoil, increasing server and desktop virtualization can be an effective way for Wall Street firms large and small to save money on hardware as well as deploy new servers and desktops more quickly and cost-effectively, with less effort on the part of IT staff. Further, virtualization can help firms extend the life of their legacy environments.
Virtualization enables organizations to take advantage of the new multicore servers coming out from Intel and AMD even when they're running legacy, single-threaded applications that aren't set up to run across multiple cores. As one Wall Street IT executive who spoke on condition of anonymity says, "There's a disconnect between software and hardware because hardware is getting faster but our software doesn't move."
Inserting a virtualization layer between legacy apps and the new servers means the time-consuming, costly and onerous chore of rewriting old applications to optimize them for new multicore servers can be put off for a time when budgets are plumper and markets are quieter. Also, some new chips, such as Intel's forthcoming Nehalem server chip, will only support newer operating systems, according to the IT executive at the Wall Street firm, while many firms run their legacy applications on older operating systems. While it's possible -- with effort -- to migrate old apps to newer operating systems, a virtualization layer enables older operating systems and applications to run on the new chips.
Intel disagrees with the IT executive's statement and in an email claims that "Nehalem server processors will run all x86 software — everything that runs on other Intel-based servers." The Wall Street executive stands by his original statement and adds: "From a customer's simple perspective: the Nehalem box won't work with older OSes," such as older versions of Red Hat's RHEL.
Virtualization can also simplify the process of extending existing applications to new offices. If an application manager needs to provide a program that's currently running in production in a New York office to staff at a new office in London, he or she typically has to set up servers, install an operating system, set up security and then deploy the applications. Using virtualization, IT can simply make a copy of the virtual machine running in New York and transfer that virtual machine image to London, then change the server's IP address to integrate the machine into the virtual environment. The application and user access will be identical to what's running in New York. The same principle applies to replicating files and applications for disaster recovery purposes.
And virtualization technology itself is improving. "Technology is enabling firms to extend virtualization in ways we couldn't do a few years ago," says Jason Choy, distinguished engineer and director of high-performance compute backbone at J.P. Morgan Chase. "CPUs, servers and storage systems have the capability to do virtualization with better performance and efficiency." For instance, he adds, on the storage side, as recently as last year VMware's virtualization technology only worked with storage area networks. Today it works with network-attached storage as well.
Halfway Between Thin and Fat
Atlantic Fund Administration in Portland, Maine, is already running a lean IT shop by using Citrix thin client workstations to reduce overall IT cost. Seventy-five percent of the firm's users leverage Web-based applications on thin clients, accessing simple applications such as Word and Excel, according to Stacey Hong, president of Atlantic's accounting group. "A new user can be up and running in a couple of hours from the time we're notified to create their IDs," he says. "Citrix meets the needs of all those users pretty easily."
This year, however, the firm will add users while looking to limit IT spending. "We'll add more workstations and potentially more Citrix servers if we need to, to handle the load," explains Bill Robinson, Atlantic's head of IT services.
But down the road the firm plans to switch over to virtualization using VMware servers. "As the Citrix servers age, we'll replace them with virtual desktops," Robinson says. "The advantage of the virtual desktop is that you can have resources dedicated to a user, versus the shared environment of Citrix, where everyone's using one server and if somebody is running an app that's consuming too many resources, that prevents another user from getting an adequate experience."
Virtualization, Robinson continues, will allow his staff to customize each desktop so that users in different areas get just the applications they need, instead of everyone receiving every application on the Citrix server. "That gives you the benefit of being able to have different desktops for different groups of users, and they'd be the only ones using the resources assigned to that desktop," he says. And, "You still have the low cost of ownership at the desktop for a thin client and monitor."
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