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Not many massive-scale IT deployments come with a try-before-you-buy option. But IT consultancy BearingPoint and enterprise software firm Cassatt Corp. are shaping up a new practice offering for financial services that allows banks and brokerages to test the impact of a new data center resource reallocation strategy in a lab environment. Both BearingPoint and Cassatt are staffing a New York-based campus opened in May for client institutions' IT teams to explore new computing infrastructures under an IT as a utility computing environment. The Utility Computing Customer Experience Center in New York's 3 World Financial Center gives banks a trial run at how utility computing - which involves decoupling software applications from hardware and operating systems and reassigning them to new servers and resources - can be built for each firm's current business needs and architecture. The center also offers follow-up training should the bank take a stab at deploying UC.
Not many massive-scale IT deployments come with a try-before-you- buy option.
But IT consultancy BearingPoint and enterprise software firm Cassatt Corp. are shaping up a new practice offering for financial services that allows banks and brokerages to test the impact of a new data center resource reallocation strategy in a lab environment.
Both BearingPoint and Cassatt are staffing a New York-based campus opened in May for client institutions' IT teams to explore new computing infrastructures under an "IT as a utility" computing environment. The "Utility Computing Customer Experience Center" in New York's 3 World Financial Center gives banks a trial run at how utility computing (UC)-which involves decoupling software applications from hardware and operating systems and reassigning them to new servers and resources-can be built for each firm's current business needs and architecture. The center also offers follow-up training should the bank take a stab at deploying UC.
"Utility computing as a term has been used for many years, and can mean different things to different people," says Frederic Veron, manager director of BearingPoint's Financial Solutions Infrastructure Solutions Practice. "So we felt that demonstrating what we mean by utility computing made quite a bit of sense."
Utility, as in grid computing or virtualization, is a technology strategy that takes advantage of the unused computing capacity in banks of servers. Instead of provisioning new hardware for peak use demands, redundancy, testing or expansion, IT administrators can use software like Cassatt's to automate the shifting of applications into unused processing resources.
Utility computing goes beyond virtualized approaches in that the underlying server configurations don't have to be on similar machines. "Virtualiztion by itself doesn't give you the flexibility," says Frank Gillett, principal analyst and vp with Forrester Research. Utility computing means he doesn't need to worry about the details within the machines, either.
"We support a number of different physical stacks," says Veron. "First, we can play with a number of technology components. The interest there is the client can see how the utility computing architecture operates with other stacks."
About the only major support function the center won't support is load and stress testing, as that would require the upload of actual applications and data-not only impractical, but treading into privacy issues, says Veron.
BearingPoint is bullish on advising adoption of the utility concept because of both the massive cost savings on power requirements and capital purchases for large operations (Veron notes discussions with bank clients sporting 10,000-plus server banks and 5,000 or more applications) and the extension of business-line flexibility. Not only can projects and programs start and shift on the fly, but a utility environment makes it easier for the IT area to track job ownership and charge-backs to other departments.
"We can take out between 30 to 50 percent of the ongoing cost of typical data center just because of how dysfunctional the data center is actually utilized," says Gamiel Gran, vp of channels and sales operation for San Jose, CA-based Cassatt, a four-year-old startup by former BEA Systems partner Bill Coleman.
Many IT operations may consider such a jumble of resources unnecessary if outsourcing options are on the table, but Veron points out that the shaved expenses from provisioning to a third- party data center operator come back in the form of a future "change of scope" and proliferating work orders to fix the problems utility computing would have handled. "If you outsource the way you have it, you're outsourcing a mess," Veron says.
Gillett says he thinks demand for this type of data systems automation is probably still immature, but the BearingPoint/Cassatt partnership may be benefiting most by their choice of location. The rapid reconfiguration and data systems automation available through utility computing is likely of most interest to IT early adopters in New York's global capital and securities firms. "They're not representative of the mass market. They are the early adopters who tend to look at these technologies, so it's exactly the kind of customer that Cassatt and BearingPoint would want to talk to," says Gillett.
Financial services is the primary initial focus of the center, but BearingPoint and Cassatt plan it to be a sandbox for technology and communications, companies as well as government agencies. (c) 2007 Bank Technology News and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.banktechnews.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
(Copyright c 2007 Thomson Media. All Rights Reserved.)