How one SME used virtualization to plan for the future

You’ve had a great startup idea, got the best team together, sourced the funding, and finally launched. You’ve tried, failed and reiterated, and now your baby has grown into a decent-sized enterprise. This is where things get tricky.

As businesses get more complex, you’d think the only way to sustain growth was to build physical infrastructure.

Turns out there’s an easier way.

Virtualization has been a buzzword for years, but what does it mean? Simply put, it is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something. The most common example of this would be when you partition your hard disk drive on your computer to create two smaller virtual disks. Business virtualization, however, is a little more sophisticated.

How do you keep growing?

Photo credit: Malcolm Browne

Meet Zheshang Securities.

The financial services company, founded in 2002 with headquarters in Hangzhou and Shanghai, rapidly outgrew its startup phase. By 2012, it was growing so quickly that upgrading its infrastructure became vital to its continued existence. Being in financial services, the company’s success and reliance on tech mirrored the growth of China’s tech economy over the last 15 years, but with that also came extra scrutiny and increased regulation of the industry.

The problem Zheshang faced was not unique: the economy, the industry, and the company was maturing. Zheshang needed help to elevate itself to the next phase of its business life cycle. The standard fix to such a problem is investing heavily in equipment, maintenance, and operations. But such a drastic step required much capital and a lot of work, and results were in no way guaranteed.

There were other issues too, some of which were outside of Zheshang’s control. Because so much of its work was done on computers, data centers became crucial to the company’s operations. But data centers often suffered from shortages of space and power, requiring Zheshang to scenario plan in advance. It was looking to grow and support itself, but being forced to do so in an infrastructure that was less than dependable.

Virtualization to the rescue

Photo credit: Perspecsys Photos

A decision was made: it was time to virtualize the business. Software, servers, networking, and storage all needed to be upgraded, and virtualization was the key to this complex lock. Zheshang Securities created 80 virtual servers from six physical ones. The reduction in cost of physical servers lead to savings, along with an increased efficiency. Since there were fewer physical servers to run, running the server room became cheaper. Less stress on optimizing a large environment meant that energy costs went down. Space, power consumption, air conditioning: all costs were reduced by consolidating a number of virtual servers onto just a few physical ones.

Initial analysis showed that Zheshang saved tens of thousands of dollars in its upgrades compared to how much it would have cost the company to do the whole thing on physical servers. The company also bought storage servers that could be used virtually, meaning it was able to expand capacity and performance as required, online. Such flexibility helped Zheshang to plan for the future, without requiring it to lock in high upfront costs in order to keep its company running.

Virtualization also helped Zheshang manage its server issues in a much easier way, through a single consolidated dashboard. This gave the company a clear overview of all operations through a single interface, meaning it could monitor, react, and build quickly as things changed in real time. This also meant that virtual backups could be readily available and quickly deployable every time a virtual machine crashed. Recovery times were shortened, and the business stayed online. With a server consolidation ratio of 1:13, Zheshang Securities was able to virtualize its business to help itself grow, deliver results, and plan for the future.

Virtualization solves problems

Virtualizing its business helped Zheshang Securities solve current problems to prepare for the future. It’s a process that helps businesses deal with particularly tricky business problems, since practically every business problem nowadays is directly or indirectly a tech problem. Processes like service virtualization, for example, can have a direct impact on how efficiently your business is run. According to HPE, service virtualization (particularly for software testing) results in a cost saving of up to 60 percent, and can make software up to 5 times easier to test and deploy. Wait times are reduced by 90 percent, which, in the real world, means reductions from 32 days to just one hour.

The numbers don’t just stop there. According to a 2015 report by Voke, 46 percent of those surveyed said that service virtualization helped them achieve a 41 percent reduction in total defects in their processes and system. Additionally, 34 percent said they achieved a decrease of 50 percent on test cycle time, and crucially, 40 percent achieved a decrease of 40 percent in software release cycle time. In this instance, HPE was able to support Zheshang Securities in not only updating its existing infrastructure, but also in future-proofing it to support the rapid growth and the accompanying complexities that it would surely face. In this way, Zheshang Securities was able to prevent a problem, with the help of HPE, before it ever had a chance to become one.

At the phase when a business is looking to build up quickly without having to compromise speed or quality, virtualization helps to minimize risks while maximizing results. The quicker a business virtualizes its operations, the higher the probability of it actually being around long enough to see the short and long term benefits of its choices. Zheshang Securities acts as a perfect example of how virtualization can help Asian companies, with the correct support and expertise of companies like HPE.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an industry leading technology company that enables customers to go further, faster. With the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio, spanning the cloud to the data center to workplace applications, our technology and services help customers around the world make IT more efficient, more productive and more secure.