Carving a niche in data centre virtualisation

It cuts costs, reduces carbon footprint and makes the business more agile.

But effective network virtualisation and the benefits that it enables may still be something of a pipe dream for many small to medium sized enterprises.

“There’s a skills gap in the industry that can make it a real challenge for SMEs to get access to the knowledge they need to make virtualisation work best for them.” says Andy Holding, a Network Consultant with Leeds-based SICL.

“The technology has become more affordable and is now available in the lower cost infrastructures rather than simply high end networking as used to be the case. But virtualising your data centre to get maximum benefit requires a specific set of skills because it’s pretty complicated stuff.

It can prove very hard for organisations to buy in those skills unless they’re large and have a direct relationship with Cisco for example.”

The result is that many SMEs are currently missing out on the full benefits that advances in virtualisation can bring - both to their balance sheets but also to their green credentials.

SMEs are a key market for SICL which provides network solutions to private and public sector customers across the UK and internationally.
SICL recruited Andy Holding (an ex-Cisco Systems Data Centre Design Specialist) specifically for his expertise in data centre design and experience of harnessing the advantages of virtualisation.

He has almost ten years experience of working day to day with advanced data centre technologies.

“The result is that we can make virtualisation from layers 2 to 7 available to any of our customers, large or small.” says Andy.

“We can give our customers much better value for money and enable them not only to make large cost reductions but also significantly improve the service offering they provide to their own customers. Legacy design required dedicated firewalls, routers, load-balancers and related equipment for each customer.  Deploying additional virtualised services means no new hardware is required removing the costs associated with providing the extra space, power and cooling.“

“New virtual services can be provisioned with the click of a mouse, without the lead-time required for physical deployments, making the business incredibly agile and providing a significant competitive advantage for our customers.”

The demand for SICL’s data centre design services is growing.

Andy is currently working on a SICL project for a regional utilities business on virtualising their network as well as service providers looking to deliver more agile services and reduce their requirements for space to house servers and associated network equipment.

“We see WAN optimisation as another growth area.  We are working with our customers to achieve the conflicting goals of centralising their services in the data centre, whilst maintaining the application performance they currently achieve with local branch-based services.”

SICL has been in business for 15 years and has built its growth – turnover reached £4.2 million last year – on investing in skills and its people.

“In many ways, the economic climate makes the cost savings that virtualisation brings arguably more important to SMEs than larger businesses that can achieve economies of scale across their all their operations. We work with organisations of all sizes but believe that continued investment in skills and knowledge enables us to provide more value.”

SICL has offered server virtualisation to its customers for several years but is now taking virtualisation throughout the network.

“Network virtualisation has to be the way forward because of all the benefits that it can bring.” says Andy.
“The drive to cut costs and carbon footprint while at the same time increasing the speed with which new network services are provisioned, means we will need to innovate continuously.”