Nationwide deploys virtualization computing solution on Linux

Nationwide deploys virtualization computing solution on Linux

Nationwide, one of the world’s largest diversified insurance and financial services organizations, announced it has completed deployment of a virtualization solution running SUSE Linux from Novell on IBM mainframe computers to help the company reduce the total cost of ownership of its IT environment. Nationwide is sharing the success of the solution by participating in a keynote presentation at LinuxWorld on August 16.
Running two IBM System z900 servers on Linux, Nationwide is deploying hundreds of virtual servers onto the mainframe systems to help it reduce the costs of data-center floor space, power, and Web hosting. A study in 2005 suggested the savings could be tens of millions of dollars over the next three years.

Prior to the deployment, Nationwide determined that 78 percent of its distributed servers were using ten percent of the computing capacity, leaving a vast amount of its server capability untapped. Consequently, the company spent valuable resources and time maintaining costly servers that took up expensive data center space, consumed energy and used only a small fraction of the available computing power.

With the new solution, virtualization features in the mainframe enable Nationwide to quickly create new virtual Linux-based servers in minutes. The company can now support and consolidate additional workloads and run hundreds of disparate applications on a single, or two, mainframe computers rather than on thousands of physical servers it would have otherwise have purchased.

Read the complete Press Release