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Creating a Data Center "MapQuest"

In order to meet the first goal of the three-pronged strategy, provision first, Wachovia needed to get a better handle on exactly what software and hardware were deployed in its data centers, and how those systems interacted with and supported the business. The company had emerged through a period of mergers and acquisitions, including the acquisition of Prudential Securities in 2003, and had adopted a number of different trading systems in the process. Wachovia now has more than 50 data centers worldwide supporting the investment banking group, and a much larger number of buildings with software and systems to support. In all, Hall estimates there are some 4,500 such locations from Asia, to London, South Africa, and all over the U.S.

Starting in early 2006, Wachovia began doing a series of architecture reviews to determine exactly what servers supported what applications and how those applications supported the business. The technology team began by writing simple Perl scripts that would run on a machine and essentially capture information related to its function. It would determine the programming language being used, the processes that were running, what network connections were taking place or what other applications were interacting.

While the home-grown querying application worked relatively well, the technology team began to explore if a commercial alternative was available to perform the same task without having to write new scripts and perhaps provide more details. At the same time, Hall says he and his team began talking about how much better it would be if they could have a visual map of the data center, showing all of the hardware and software components and how they connected with one another. Essentially, a data center MapQuest.

The first piece of the puzzle was filled through a software package from Tideway Systems of London, called Foundation. Foundation automatically maps business applications to the underlying physical infrastructure, including the dependencies between applications and systems. Hall says one bonus with the Tideway product over Wachovia's home-grown application, is that it provided a modeling tool. It could take an equities trading platform, for example, and visually model the various servers and components that supported the platform.

Next, Wachovia formed a partnership with the University of Carolina and IntePoint, a Charlotte-based provider of simulation and visualization software, to help it create the 3-D map of its data center operations. That project has been underway for about a year now and Hall says almost all of the servers, applications, and people connected to those applications in the investment side of the bank have been mapped. In addition, physical assets on the map, such as servers and storage devices, have been colorized based on how much of their capacity is being utilized and their peak power consumption.

"Now we can see power usage by building and by application, so it's easier to visualize which machines we can eliminate to improve performance," says Hall.

In addition, it allows Wachovia to better determine how it can make use of existing capacity through such technologies as server virtualization. And that leads to the goal of provision first. "Rather than ordering first, we've learned to provision to the virtual or existing infrastructure first and only buy hardware if we need it," says Hall.