By 2006, St. James's Place had deployed over 150 physical servers, located across three geographically dispersed locations, London, Frankfurt and Cirencester. A number of these servers were dedicated to running individual applications used by a small but important number of users, resulting in low utilisation and spare capacity. Equally, the business has several services that are heavily utilised and constantly require more server resources.

St. James's Place wished to take advantage of emerging technologies that promised to deliver processing and memory on demand, where and when required, efficiently and at a reduced cost relative to the traditional server-based model. Additionally, St. James's Place wished to improve upon its Recovery Time Objective in the event of a disaster associated with the loss of individual applications or the entire data centre.

The existing DR approach was less than efficient, requiring the deployment of identical hardware and software in separate data centres. It also required the environments to be kept in synchronisation as any differences in configuration between data centres would extend recovery time in the event of a disaster.

Virtualisation was identified as a technology that could dramatically improve recovery time and certainty, reduce management costs and ultimately reduce business risk. Virtualisation also promised increased flexibility by enabling the rapid deployment of new servers and traffic balancing between servers and locations, in response to business change.

As Phil Beville, IT Director, St. James's Place explains, "The situation was, quite simply, that it would be challenging to meet our business recovery time objectives without virtualisation."

Initially, St. James's Place focused the virtualisation on its Citrix farm as this requires continuous tuning of CPU and memory between servers in response to demand. St. James's Place also chose to virtualise several legacy applications used by a limited number of users and where the servers were under-utilised.

St. James's Place is now deploying an upgraded version of its corporate database on a virtual platform using VMware. This technology enables them to split the application server from the database server on the same physical machine and allocate resources according to demand. Through the use of VMotion, St. James's Place is able to improve upon the level of resilience previously provided at low incremental cost per user. The server instances will automatically be started on another server should the physical environment suffer a failure.

Virtualising the IT infrastructure has enabled the company to deliver a more dynamic and efficient computing environment. The solution has increased flexibility and availability with the option to move virtual servers across a pool of machines and better leverage the available resources. Importantly, the solution has reduced the capital and maintenance costs of consolidated computing resource.

Further, the solution ensures that St. James's Place business continuity objectives can be met, by implementing a unified disaster recovery platform that allows many production servers to be recovered without the costly one-to-one mapping of production and DR hardware. The DR solution provides application and hardware independent disaster recovery and delivers a faster, more flexible and more reliable DR solution at a lower cost.

Phil Beville comments, "Attenda's Virtual Infrastructure Managed Service has delivered a simpler and more cost effective technology platform that meets the strategic needs of our business."

St. James's Place has been working with Attenda since 2003 following a competitive tender process to find a new provider for outsourcing the operation and management of its servers supporting its business critical applications.

Driven by a major technology upgrade, St. James's Place chose Attenda as its partner to design and deploy a new server infrastructure to support the business and manage it to a highly available SLA thereafter.

Phil Beville adds, "We had no desire to operate and manage this technology platform in-house and so we looked for a specialist provider who would be responsive, flexible and aligned to our business objectives and culture."

He continues, "We recognised that Attenda's proven expertise and in-depth skills of managing virtual infrastructures would meet our criteria and, in them, we found a proactive partner with whom we could work to continue to improve our technology platform and standards of service whilst, at the same time managing costs.

St. James's Place is already benefiting from the virtualisation of its IT infrastructure in several areas. Attenda is delivering guaranteed service levels, backed by a business focused and robust service level agreement. The cost for operating and managing its IT infrastructure is fixed for 5 years, providing the business with complete predictability of its IT costs.

Further, Attenda's ISO 27001 operational and security quality standards, and ITIL based operational framework provide St. James's Place with full compliance with FSA regulations for data security, backups and disaster recovery and with class leading data centre facilities.

Attenda is delivering 24 x 7 support and access to technology skills on demand in the areas that are key to the operational environment: Citrix, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and VMware.

St. James's Place values the Attenda partnership as an essential part of its business strategy and has developed a strong relationship at all levels within the business.

As Phil Beville concludes, "We will continue to look to Attenda to optimise the operation and support of our IT environment and to ensure that we have the flexibility and scalability to grow with and adapt to the changing demands of our business, now and in the future."