Today, Telus Communications Co. is well on its way down a successful virtualization path. It’s a vastly different picture than six years ago when the telecommunications giant was apprehensive about deploying virtualization around the edge of its x86 architecture.
“We are a public organization that’s required at all times to find the right balance of IT spend and risk,” said Bob Moye, director of national data centre applications at Telus Canada. “Almost no IT organization is immune to these pressures due to the continued growing demand for IT and the constrained, if not shrinking IT resources. The resulting imperative of do more with less is inevitable.”
Telus began its server virtualization journey in 2004 to deal with its growing population of servers, many of which were aging and running on obsolete or almost obsolete operating systems, according to Moye. Today, Telus has its internal systems, product applications and tools on VMware server virtualization platforms.
“We’re also experiencing significant growth in terms of virtualizing our managed service space where server virtualization, both dedicated and multi-tenant, production servers, virtual desktops and disaster recovery solutions are being adopted,” Moye added. “The common thread for all three areas of virtualization across servers and desktops is the improved efficiency for sustaining IT operations and the increased flexibility for growth and change it provides our organization on an ongoing basis.”
However, the benefits to be had from virtualizing parts of its business processes weren’t always clear for the company, Moye said. “We had initial apprehension of the virtualization but it quickly disappeared,” he explained. “And in 2009, we reached the tipping point where more virtual workloads were deployed than physical ones. The organic growth we saw since 2004 was accelerated and virtualized became a standard for production use.” According to Moye, thousands of Telus’ virtual servers are yielding an average consolidation ratio of eight to one. “It’s a huge success for us,” he said.”
