In keeping with its product strategy, Unisys developed its infrastructure management suite (IMS) to cater for its new virtual world, Ottt said.
With automated provisioning through a portal, what used to take 10 days to provision a virtual machine now it takes eight minutes.
“All of a sudden we were getting lots of virtual machines growing like rabbits so we defined a 90 day automatic lease," Ott said. "If they don't renew it, it's gone.”
A similar system was then implemented for the physical infrastructure, also cutting down provisioning time. Another internal tool can “clean up” a virtual machine if it’s deemed out of compliance.
“These weren't planned originally so we evolved,” Ott said. “We implemented and internal tool called e-chargeback. We don't do formal chargeback, but we are down to individuals and departments, or job codes, to see what's happening. All of a sudden consumption of IT wasn't allocation-based, but demand-based.”
With the engineering team (thousands around the world) given control over all this system it became Unisys’ internal cloud for internal IT, development and testing.
The cloud will be progressively expanded over next few years to encompass most of Unisys’s operations.
About 100TB has been moved to the virtual storage environment and all company e-mail will be hosted in the cloud by the end of this quarter.
The result of all this is an estimated 700 fewer servers from 2006 and $3 million saved in cloud infrastructure costs.
“We redeployed staff who were managing infrastructure as we don't need a person on site at the data centre,” Ott said.
“For DR it’s a case of taking these workloads and moving them in a matter of minutes to the data centre in Salt Lake City. We can move an application and everything associated with it from one site to another in 28 minutes.”
Unisys’ virtualisation adventure has had such a profound effect on the company it is changing its product strategy because of it.
“It's getting harder to justify high-end boxes, even though our mainframe is part of the cloud infrastructure strategy,” Ott said. “There is so much flexibility in what we do today.”
With the virtual infrastructure established, the next big move may be on the desktop.
Ott said Unisys is now piloting a virtual desktop offering it has co-developed with Microsoft.
Virtual desktops combined with smartcards for authentication enable staff to log on to a work station and have their desktop “follow” them around based on a role.
Unisys is also testing Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation hypervisor to see how it scales, and although VMware is its standard hypervisor, “that doesn't mean we wouldn't move to Microsoft in the future”.
“If you're already a Microsoft shop the way they are integrating it with other software will make it easy for an IT shop to get their head around it.”