BAE Systems: Virtualisation Cuts Projects' Times, Costs

BAE Systems must move very quickly in response to market challenges. When new projects are set up, it is essential for project teams to have the right technology support and IT environments as and when needed.

Yet until recently, CSC was required to build and configure a custom-made environment for each new project. This process could take up to three months, which was too long for an increasingly fast-moving industry. So under the terms of a new agreement, BAE Systems challenged us to find a new way to support project teams, cutting the time and cost needed to get started.

A virtual solution

We responded with an entirely new solution. Instead of building a new physical environment for each project, we used the latest version of the VMWare virtualisation platform to create a far more flexible and cost-effective approach: the Virtual Midrange Application Service (VMAS).

VMAS is based on a flexible pool of servers at one of CSC’s datacentres and allows a new, virtual project environment to be configured whenever a BAE Systems business group needs it. The effect is to provide an “internal private cloud” for BAE Systems within CSC’s own data centre. This offers all the advantages of emerging cloud-based services, including scalability, rapid provisioning and payment by usage, backed by the security assurances that a dedicated, private physical location brings.

Immediate benefits

By providing project environments as a scalable, on-demand service, we have delivered immediate and growing business benefits to BAE Systems:

• Speed. Setting up a specific server instance for an individual project under the previous system could take between 8 and 12 weeks to be fully functional. Providing the same environment as a service now takes an average of three days

• Cost. The headline costs for each project are now vastly reduced, as there is no longer the need for any upfront capital investment. All costs are now transferred from CapEx to OpEx and the service price includes all necessary hardware and software. Recurring support charges are on average 25% lower than before, while savings are also made on general project costs as a result of the faster start to development.

• Flexibility. Teams can interact in a more agile way for all projects within the BAE Systems restricted and commercial networks. The service-based approach fosters flexible collaborative working and enables fast scaling to reflect changing project needs.

For More Information

Download the full BAE Systems VMAS case study (PDF, 986 KB).

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