Fidelity looks to virtualize, standardize data center resources

A huge server virtualization is underway at Fidelity Investments, as the nation's largest mutual fund company focuses on creating a more streamlined and adaptive IT infrastructure better able to serve the needs of more than 40,000 employees and 24 million individual and corporate customers.

Targeting both x86 and high-end RISC servers, Fidelity is planning to virtualize the "'vast majority"' of its servers within the next several years, says Michael Brady, a senior vice president in Fidelity's technology group in Boston. (Compare server products.) Fidelity is also consolidating its U.S. data centers, concentrating server power more densely into a smaller, more manageable number of facilities.

Fidelity's major technology goals, which also include standardizing systems rather than taking a best-of-breed approach, are geared toward building tiered offerings that give each application the resources it needs without wasting server power on those that don't require the highest levels of performance.

"'When you scale infrastructure, historically it was built to be as [powerful] as the highest-performing application needed, and everything else would benefit from that,"' Brady says. "'Now we're looking at providing several different options of performance. We don't have a one-size-fits-all approach."'

Brady is responsible for Fidelity's infrastructure and engineering, overseeing mainframes, x86 and RISC servers, network and phone systems, databases, middleware and operating systems.

Brady wouldn't reveal specifics about Fidelity's technology, such as the number of data centers the company operates, or which hardware or virtualization vendors the company buys from. In an interview with Network World, he spoke generally about the major themes Fidelity's IT department finds important: virtualization, consolidation and standardization.

The advantages of server virtualization are numerous, Brady notes. "'Box consolidation"' is just a "'fringe benefit,"' he says. Simplifying and automating maintenance by treating everything as a virtual application is a big time-saver.

"'Today an application has so many hooks into an operating system and a platform, that maintenance has to be done concurrently and it's a very complex, time-consuming process,"' Brady says. "'By applying a hypervisor, even if we have one application on one box, we completely change our service models, we change our provisioning models, and we provide optimized service management."'

Fidelity began virtualizing servers almost three years ago, and is broadening that effort. The key isn't really choosing the right vendor, whether it be VMware or Microsoft, Brady says. The important thing is breaking the bond between hardware and application across nearly all Fidelity's infrastructure.

Just about any application is a candidate for virtualization, but some will be pushed off until near the end of the project due to complexity. The virtualization of high-end RISC systems with significant scaling needs will have to wait, partly because RISC virtualization software is less mature than x86 hypervisors, Brady says.