... to virtualise or not. As for business criticality, in fact, there's more a drive to virtualise there because, for things like availability, instead of having one instance of that environment running, you might have five and you can lose two and still run on three," he said.
"With physical servers, you have to put in place clusters or other procedures so that if hardware fails, it kicks off lots of physical moves ... In a virtual server, all you need to do is point a copy of the machine at a new piece of tin."
Storage virtualisation
Despite the hype around TCP/IP networked storage, few businesses appear to have gone down the path. However, according to Harlow, Suncorp's CIO, ex-Telstra IT head, Jeff Smith, has lead the company's foray into this still-nascent storage arena.
"If you're looking at storage, that's quite radical to be using virtualisation and IP-attached storage," said Harlow.
Normally banking and insurance companies are not considered bleeding edge, said Harlow, but the fact that Smith had rolled out IP-networked and virtualised storage networks at Telstra gave Suncorp a leg up in its own rollout of the technology.
"Telstra have done lots of it and we work with Telstra in term of using it as a blue print. As Jeff would say, 'Why invent something your self, when can look at what the industry leaders have done'?"
All the data on Suncorp's open systems, such as its UNIX, Intel and Linux servers is stored on this IP network, said Harlow.
Because it's all TCP/IP the storage works by the device file head sitting in front of the storage, he said.
Suncorp has also moved away from its tape backup system and has installed NetApp's Nearstore backup systems, which, according to Harlow, costs around AU$2 per gigabyte.
"It's slower disk that doesn't offer real time I/O but it's got smarts," he said.
