Musgrave Group gets stuck into change
By Leslie Faughnan
The first step in virtualisation for any business is just getting stuck in, according to Tony Griffin, head of IT shared services in the Musgrave Group. Musgrave is a €4.8 billion distribution company that includes the Centra and SuperValu brands, and the Budgens and Londis brands in Britain.
“Virtualisation is a fantastic step in technology that simplifies operations and lowers costs,” he said.
“My belief is that complexity generally drives costs up and virtualisation offers a range of advantages as well as the economics. “So my advice is to get on with it, pick some elements of your IT infrastructure and start to explore what virtualisation can offer.”
Musgrave has implemented virtualisation on five primary sites including its twin group data centres in Cork and Britain. There are 65 VMware virtual servers on a HP blade chassis – which is about one VM per application – and a mix of HP and IBM equipment in the infrastructure. The group-wide applications are central and virtualised although, across the operating divisions, there are still legacy systems that are being brought into the fold.
“We are rolling out a comprehensive retailing solution to our Centra and SuperValu retail partners over the next two years, which is a hosted and managed service. We must have robust operations and high availability and that is possible principally because we have virtualised solutions and a reliable telecommunications infrastructure to deliver the capability.”
Business continuity is highly important to the Musgrave Group and Griffin said that “our DR capability is enhanced because of our use of virtualisation tools. It is very easy to automate failover between servers or data centres. We use very little tape any more and mostly just for archive purposes, not recovery.”
He strongly recommends consultants for the design and implementation of a virtualisation programme. “They are serial implementers, so they have a collective intelligence that is worth tapping into and their knowledge is always current,” he said.” With the right implementation partner your own IT team will learn from experience.”
Musgrave has worked with PFH since the beginning and Griffin said his own team included a number of people who were expert or proficient in virtualisation technology, which is an important professional resource in ongoing development.
He suggested also that the best places to start virtualisation pilots may be with the slightly dodgy applications or technology that IT is not 100 per cent happy about.” In a safe test environment, you can move from the physical to the virtual, learn about virtualisation and more than likely mitigate risks.”
But when the organisation did embrace virtualisation, he said, it was important to see it through all the way.” To gain the maximum benefits, virtualisation has to be totally embedded as a way of working. With a homogenous IT environment the benefits can really be leveraged fully.”
