When apps are virtualized

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Two years ago, Paul Little, senior architect at Fidelity National Financial in San Diego, faced a crisis. Server hardware and operating system costs were growing out of control as Little struggled to provide the company's IT team with various client and server configurations. These were needed to support more than 30 customized versions of a large commercial lending application used by the firm's real estate and financial services customers.

"We had a silo environment, with each customer in its own little world," Little says.

When a new IT employee learned of the situation, he suggested application virtualization - in particular, application virtualization using Softricity's SoftGrid software. The staffer had worked with SoftGrid previously and felt it could provide the means of curbing server hardware and operating systems growth at Fidelity National.

Softricity is among a small number of vendors offering application virtualization products. Each vendor takes a different approach, but the general purpose of application virtualization is to separate application code from the restrictions of individual servers, operating systems and clients. This is much like storage virtualization, which uses an abstraction layer to separate stored information from individual drives.

Softricity's SoftGrid lets applications run on Windows computers without installation or alteration to their host operating systems. SoftGrid "sequences" Windows applications by capturing the installation process and creating customized application components that it then provides to clients via the Softricity Application Server.

Because the applications are never permanently loaded on the client - running only in the customized Softricity environment - license requirements apply only to the central server.

Using SoftGrid, applications from remote servers can run locally without changes to the local environment, and multiple versions of an application can run on the same client concurrently.

Easy decision

Despite initial skepticism about the application virtualization concept, Little heeded the new employee's advice and let Softricity conduct a proof-of-concept demonstration with Fidelity National applications. That was all the convincing Little needed. "That sold us, seeing multiple versions of our application running side by side on our client support systems," he says, noting that within six months developers were using SoftGrid for all support needs.

Fidelity National uses Citrix servers to distribute applications to local and remote clients. Developers in the U.K. and in India, and consultants at customer sites, receive access from the SoftGrid application servers running on Citrix. Salespeople can demonstrate commercial lending software managed by Softricity while sitting in a prospect's office.

Little counts some serious cost savings. "One application we sequenced through SoftGrid to leave as a single environment with multiple client instances saved us from spending $50,000 for a second server hardware license," he says.