Nebulas Solutions helps Moneycorp cut costs with virtual investment “The Nebulas team really added value from the outset; their deployment expertise meant we didn’t need to purchase a SAN, saving us

tens of thousands of pounds”

Moneycorp

» TTT Moneycorp

TTT Moneycorp Limited (Moneycorp) has been delivering specialist foreign exchange services since 1979 and currently serves in

excess of 2.8 million customers a year. With headquarters in London, Moneycorp has more than 600 employees and is a global

operation spanning the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain and the United States. The company has three divisions, providing

commercial foreign exchange, retail and wholesale currency services to a range of private and corporate customers, as well as a

wholly-owned subsidiary, Moneycorp Markets.

» The Challenge

Moneycorp has expanded considerably over the years, achieving more than 20% income growth annually since 1979. Inevitably, there was a continuous demand for more servers to host the increasing range of applications needed to meet its day-to-day activities. Being based in Central London, Moneycorp was quickly running out of physical space to house the large number of traditional rack-mounted and tower servers it required. As a result, the organisation adopted VMware’s virtualisation platform, to improve the availability and efficiency of resources to their growing business.

The implementation of VMware ESX 3.0.2 was successful, but Moneycorp continued to expand and heavy demands were placed on this virtual infrastructure.

“In terms of servers, we were approaching capacity,” states Moneycorp. The potential impact of the physical space constraints was significant. “With the continued plans for expansion, we were looking for a more space- and cost-efficient solution.”

Moneycorp therefore decided to plan migration to a blade server infrastructure and SAN running a newer version of VMware. Sourcing these was relatively straightforward; “...the complicated bit was going to be the migration process itself” according to Moneycorp, “and it was where we needed the help of a trusted partner”.

The choice of partner was critical: “They had to be happy to work alongside our chosen hardware, in terms of rolling out the new blade infrastructure and SAN. More importantly, we had to be able to support the new infrastructure going forward, so our team needed to be trained and the roll-out documented and handed over in full”.

» The Solution

An existing commercial relationship led Moneycorp to meet with Nebulas Virtualise, a division of Nebulas Solutions Group. “Nebulas

brought one of their virtualization services specialists along to the meeting,” explains Moneycorp, “and this was where they really

started to add value. We were very impressed by their approach – which mirrored our own. They also understood the importance

of keeping to budget.”

Nebulas suggested that Moneycorp upgrade to VMware vSphere™ 4, the latest release from VMware – which included a number of

new features that Moneycorp could use to realise some significant cost savings. One of these was vStorage Thin Provisioning,

which provides dynamic allocation of storage capacity. This can make a significant reduction in storage requirements and cut the

associated costs. “Our VMDK usage when we were running VMware ESX 3.0.2 was 1.8TB, but the implementation of vSphere 4

allowed us to get this down by almost 50% overall,” says Moneycorp. “If we’d had to buy extra storage in the form of a SAN it

would have been very expensive.”

Nebulas added further value by suggesting that Moneycorp use VMware ESXi 4 software instead of the previous version, as it is

compatible with a far broader range of hardware. “Nebulas highlighted that the newer version is bootable from USB, so we saved

on the cost of more 200Gb hard drives,” explains Moneycorp.

Nebulas Virtualise set out a migration strategy including blade configuration, custom installation of vSphere and the configuration

of the new, virtual environment including datacenter consolidation, cluster and resource pools. Migration to the new SAN could

now take place. The final part of the process was training the Moneycorp team, providing documentation and then handing over

the project.

As the migration began, the Nebulas Virtualise team continued to impress. “We had some hardware teething issues which could

have thrown the timing of the project off course,” explains Moneycorp. “Fortunately, the Nebulas team was very flexible and

responded quickly to our shifting requirements. When you run a project like this, it’s critical for your chosen partners to act as an

extension of your own team – which the Nebulas team did. Their attitude was excellent.”

» The Future

Nebulas Virtualise handed the ongoing server migration over to Moneycorp in November 2009. Whilst the full migration is yet to be

completed, Moneycorp considers the project a great success. “The technical and commercial expertise demonstrated from the

outset by Nebulas Solutions Group has been of paramount importance for the success of this project,” states Moneycorp.

» Customer needs met

» Simplifying ESXi 4 deployment, providing savings on both consultancy and hardware

» vStorage Thin Provisioning, resulting in significant monetary savings on physical storage

» Reduced burden on IT support team, freeing up time for more strategic tasks

» Improved virtual infrastructure, enabling greater operational agility and continuity

» Documentation and training, delivering ongoing savings on new infrastructure support

» Deployed solutions

» VMware vSphere™ 4