VMware, the global leader in virtualisation and cloud infrastructure, said its has deployed its latest virtualisation platform at Bank Al Bilad, a leading Sharia-based financial solutions provider.

This is part of a major data centre transformation project, virtualising 95 per cent of its data centre, said a statement from the company.

In addition to virtualising its servers, the bank migrated from one gigabit ethernet core switching to 10 gigabit ethernet, and implemented a new storage virtualisation and IP-based storage infrastructure.

The new features enable the bank to continue to offer unrivalled customer service across a range of commercial banking services.

"We needed to increase our data centre capacity dramatically and decrease our number of physical servers without compromising on quality of customer service," said Bank Al Bilad chief information officer Rashed Al Othman.

"We saw an opportunity with VMware to move our system to virtualised servers and significantly improve our efficiency.

"With the help of VMware, we have now virtualised 95 per cent of our data centre and we have 750 virtual servers with 60 per cent capacity, which is a substantial improvement.

"Equally, we now have access to a much more flexible and secure virtualised platform that provides us with room to expand in the future," he added.-TradeArabia News Service