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Capital One cuts servers with virtualization

13.02.2006
Capital One Financial Corp. is reducing its server count even as it expands and acquires new businesses. To help in that effort, the McLean, Va.-based credit card and financial services company uses virtualization in its servers and networks and is piloting a database virtualization program. In an interview with Computerworld, Lee Congdon, vice president of corporate technology at Capital One, said the company's goals are to reduce technology costs and improve the IT department's ability to meet business needs. Congdon also talked about the industry's role in spreading the technology.

Why is virtualization a core part of Capital One's IT strategy? As we acquire various firms, we're going to be presented with different operating system environments, different networking environments, different networking suites and so on. [Virtualization technology] buys us time in circumstances where a specific application is ready to move over and we need to shut down that physical location, or where we need to move off aging hardware or software. It also gives us better management tools and controls across the environment. [And] if we can go from 50 percent to 85 percent utilization on the servers, that's free money. Another [benefit] is alignment with the business -- [delivering] application solutions quickly when we're asked to do projects.

What is the state of your virtualization efforts so far? We are probably 30 percent of the way through a three-year plan to [cut the company's 1,600 servers] to 1,100. In addition, we've made investments in storage virtualization, and we're piloting database virtualization. Our networks are becoming more and more virtual to enable us to manage the acquisitions.

How mature are virtualization technologies? They're getting better, but we're going to need heterogeneous as opposed to homogeneous management and service-level tools. Right now, each vendor is [individually] approaching the problem, or a part of the problem, and what I don't see us having yet are industry-standard services for management across the broader virtual space.

Is Capital One heading toward heterogeneous Nirvana -- treating an enterprise as one big virtual resource pool? It will be a while before its gets to be that simple. Under the covers, it will probably never be that simple. But to the extent that we can move in that direction, that's an advantage for us. I think it's going to be a while before we get to Nirvana, but steps in that direction are important.

How do you get skilled people to build and run virtualized environments? I see going forward a mix of our associates, typically in leadership and direction-setting roles; vendor partners, typically in "performer" roles but with full accountability and responsibility for delivering to service levels; and then additional contractor and consultant personnel to fill in specific skill gaps.