BT, an old-line telephone com-pany formerly known as British Telecom, is trying to transform from a conventional telecom and networking company into an international IT services powerhouse. Virtualization technology is a key tactic in bringing about that change. BT Ireland has created a 50-ter-abyte pool of shared storage resources using hardware from EMC Corp., and it has reduced the number of Windows and Unix servers from 40 to two using virtual-machine software from VMware Inc., an EMC unit. "I personally have been waiting a long time to get to the point where we have a smaller number of physical boxes running multiple applications," says Martin Wickham, CIO of BT Ireland. He envisions expanding this virtual infrastructure so BT can create a utility-style IT backbone from which it can sell both storage and server capacity, a concept it's testing with two customers.
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