Interesting Snippets

private cloud models are playing an increasingly pivotal role in core banking activities… One example is Wells Fargo, the San Francisco-based bank, which touts the advantages of using cloudlike technologies to help steer the company through a three-year integration project following the $15bn acquisition of Wachovia…
Wells Fargo began by “virtualising” its servers – running software that enables multiple applications to run on the same server and still be managed as though each has its own dedicated server.
The advantages of this are much greater flexibility – you can add a virtual server for a new application almost instantly – and much more efficient use of the physical hardware. For example, 80 per cent usage of a server’s capacity instead of 15 per cent.
Additionally, by moving to standardised software – programs used by everyone – it effectively made a private cloud inside its own firewalls. This enabled the bank to reduce its number of data centres dramatically, cut the number of applications it was running by 25 per cent to 3,000 and decreased the time needed for starting up a new application server from months to 10 days.
By the end of last year, almost two-thirds of the bank’s servers were virtualised and 80 per cent standardised.
As a result, Wells Fargo achieved $1bn in savings with a significant portion attributed to its infrastructure efficiency effort.