Phillip Reynolds, Data Center Director, Williams & Fudge, discussed their virtualized environment and specific financial sector IT requirements with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman live at VMworld 2013.

Williams & Fudge is an accounts receivable management firm, working for about 13,000 colleges, universities, and other private financial institutions. It has 400 employees, most of them working in the call center.

“As the environment is changing in our industry, we have to work the business harder, work our staff harder and work our IT harder to be able to make the same return we were making a few years ago,” Reynolds explained. The company needs do everything they did before, but in a more economical fashion.

Special needs require specialized infrastructure

Williams & Fudge is a VMware customer with specific data center challenges, as the business is located in an 150 year old cotton factory, disaster recovery being one of their key requirements. They use a VMware cluster for servers, having about 80 servers, and another cluster for desktops. The collaboration started four years ago with the realization that the company had no disaster recovery solution and many physical services. “Virtualization stuck out” as a solution, Reynolds said.

“Every mission critical app that we have is actually virtualized,” Reynolds stated, everything but the phone system. “We saw a lot of the server virtualization aspects could carry into the desktop space,” and the company is currently on the path to virtualizing all our desktops. Sales and customer service are already virtualized, and about 60 percent of their call center.

Asked about their usage of RecoverPoint, Reynolds explained they determined their RPO and RTO in a conversation that started with the possibility of a fire at the headquarters. The current RPO is of 15 to 30 minutes and RTO is of less than five. “I have not had to do a recovery,” he said, but he had been able to use RecoveryPoint to move virtualized servers easily.

Agility with the cloud

Commenting on their private cloud usage, Reynolds said “management is the real key there,” as they did not have to add more IT staff. They will next be looking at was hybrid service. He added they would try vCloud hybrid services “once they are compliant.”

Driving higher commissions is key in Williams & Fudge business, therefore virtualized desktops that can be up and running in a minute help make employees happy and ready to gain more commissions. “We have to be fully compliant too,” he added, mentioning their traveling sales people who access virtual desktops in the data center through their tablets.

Virtualization “made our business more agile. We are looking into new markets,” he explained, and no longer need to worry about our infrastructure.

Asked how he managed to deal with conflicting IT objectives, Reynolds said “always doing your research is super key. I am always looking for the new solution that solves multiple problems at once.” IT professionals should go to conferences, talk to other people and user groups, and also check social media channels

As far as flash disrupting the industry is concerned, Reynolds said the company has been using EMC’s flash technology. EMC as a company was a great partner as it “has never really failed us” in what services support or product delivery are concerned. They also have a wide array of solutions for any business size.  The company worked with 25-35 vendors and EMC was “right at the top” of the spectrum of quality.