KBC Clearing, a subsidiary of the Belgian financial services company KBC, is a leading financial services institution in Europe. As a clearing firm, KBC Clearing works within the regulations of the financial services industry to provide their customers with cost-efficient clearing, execution and prime brokerage services. Based in The Netherlands, the company serves an international customer base and focuses primarily on the European stock and derivatives exchanges.
In 2006, KBC Clearing began planning to relocate their offices, requiring them to move their data center which housed 40 servers. As they researched ways to simplify the move, they identified virtualization as a way to avoid the frustrations of moving so many machines. “It’s always easier to move four virtual servers than forty physical ones,” said Rob de Wit, IT specialist of KBC Clearing. “That was one of the many benefits of adopting virtualization.”
The company also wanted to ease management issues. Because KBC Clearing is a financial services company, they must follow certain banking rules which require a strict separation of particular services on different servers. These restrictions have resulted in a large data center with more machines. They viewed virtualization as a way to consolidate servers while keeping services separate. “It takes time to set up a physical machine,” said de Wit. “In the past, when we needed a new file or mail server, we would order it and then wait a few days for it to arrive.”
KBC Clearing began using Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition in mid-2006. “We conducted a thorough survey of virtualization systems, and XenServer offered the best choice for us for a variety of reasons,” said de Wit.
de Wit learned about XenServer on Wikipedia, where he found a chart comparing XenServer Enterprise Edition to VMware ESX. “One important reason we chose Citrix XenServer was cost. VMware’s offerings are significantly more expensive,” said de Wit. “They had some nice features and tricks, but we didn’t need them, especially if we were going to pay around ten times more than what we’d pay for XenServer products.”
KBC Clearing also chose Citrix XenServer because of its superior performance. “XenServer outperforms VMware ESX,” said de Wit. “When we did a performance test on both Linux and Windows, XenServer came out best.”
KBC Clearing now has seven Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition licenses with four of them deployed and the rest to be used in the future. The company is in the middle of relocating their data center which now houses five HP DL360 servers with Intel Xeon VT processors. Each server is running between seven to 12 guest operating systems for a total of 35 virtual machines.
de Wit says that it initially took him and his team ten minutes to deploy Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition. And despite the time it took to configure the first server, de Wit noted, “Now we just import a master guest and in ten minutes we have a new server up and running.”
In fact, KBC Clearing has experienced many benefits since deploying XenServer, including a reduction of non-server hardware. “We were primarily looking for ease of management, but we also benefited from the fact that we don’t need a KVM switch. Now, we just connect with the XenServer administrator console.”
Another valuable perk is that every time de Wit needs a new server, he only needs to deploy a new virtual machine instead of purchasing a server. This is even more beneficial as the new data center is located several miles from the office, and with Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition they can deploy virtual machines remotely. This saves substantial time as well as money. “We have empty server rooms right now,” stated de Wit. “And we’re saving a lot on power consumption. Normally in Holland you pay around 200 Euros a year for each server.” This expense results in a virtualization savings for KBC Clearing of around $11,000 USD per server per year.
Additionally, KBC Clearing runs batch process daily on different physical Windows machines. Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition enables the batch process to run more than two times faster, as it traditionally took six hours to complete a batch-run on a physical machine, and now takes between two to three hours on a Xen virtual machine.
KBC Clearing will complete its move to the new data center in November 2007. By that time, de Wit says they will definitely have more virtual machines than the original count of physical ones. “I install new machines every day,” said de Wit. “The data center is quickly growing, and we are already experiencing the cost and time savings provided by Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition.”
KBC Clearing is also looking forward to new releases of XenServer, as the product roadmap was one of the areas the company was impressed by during their selection process. “We saw that Citrix moves quickly and is looking at how the data center is changing and which new features would be most valuable to customers,” said de Wit. “We are confident that as our needs evolve and grow, XenServer Enterprise Edition will expand with us.”
For more information, please call 650-798-5900 or visit www.citrix.com
For more information about KBC Clearing, please visit www.kbc-clearing.com.