But rather than drown in the relocation of so much hardware as part of a year-long data consolidation project, the financial services firm turned to a mix of server virtualization and WAN acceleration.

The goal for parent company Axa Life Japan was to consolidate three data centers into one, but steep real estate costs meant the 300 servers had to find a more cost-effective home.

The data centers were spread across various sites in Tokyo and migrating the data to Melbourne has taken 10 months.

The initial plan was to migrate the Dell, HP, IBM and Sun Solaris servers from the various sites in Japan.

At the Melbourne site there is a mixture of Wintel, Sun Solaris and Linux boxes and at the end of the project some virtual servers in Japan stayed virtualized. Some physical servers in Japan became virtualized in Melbourne.