VMware announced that United Bancorp has standardized on VMware Infrastructure 3, the datacenter virtualization and management suite, as the foundation for a virtualized IT environment that delivers greater application availability to better serve customers.

United is a financial holding company with 275 employees. Its two subsidiaries are community banks that provide personal and business banking services. The company adopted a virtualization-first policy as part of its strategy to improve customer service and operational efficiency, reduce IT expenses, and strengthen application and system resiliency. United is currently running its core banking and trust applications, business-critical database systems, and Internet banking site on VMware virtualization infrastructure.

“When we looked at virtualization solutions, nobody came close to matching VMware’s reliability, manageability, tool set, and support,” said Arell Chapman, Assistant Vice President for Network Administration at United Bancorp.

With over 100 virtual machines on five physical hosts, and headroom for additional virtual machines, the company has retired 38 physical servers thus far and is planning to scale back further. Since deploying VMware Infrastructure, the company’s virtualized applications have experienced zero unplanned downtime. In fact, availability for applications such as Internet banking has actually increased.

“From an operational perspective, virtualization has been an enormous success,” said Chapman. “In the past, if our Internet banking site went down, our clients would be unable to use our site for a period of time. By contrast, the VMware platform’s high-availability features ensure that customers aren’t even aware of technical glitches. There is literally no service interruption. VMware virtualization has been a big help from a security standpoint, too. During a recent security audit, our outside vendor was unable to find any vulnerabilities. And for the first time, disaster recovery has become so affordable that we can actually consider bringing it in-house.”

VMware research shows that small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) in all vertical industries are concerned about infrastructure uptime and the ability to implement a disaster-recovery plan that ensures business continuity.

“Traditionally SMBs have had to implement "good enough" solutions that include tape or disk backup of critical applications, while leaving the rest of their business at risk in the event of a disaster or other unplanned downtime,” said Dan Chu, vice president, emerging products and solutions, VMware. “The need for continuous uptime for all apps that run the business is critical for an SMB. VMware Midsize and Enterprise Acceleration Kits deliver VMware Infrastructure bundled solutions that enable an SMB to simply and affordably implement a plan that protects their business from that unwanted downtime.”

Chapman noted that virtualization has also been valuable on many other levels. VMware Infrastructure enables the company to pool computing resources to handle peaks and valleys in application loads more efficiently, open new offices faster, and defer expenses for items such as additional hardware and cooling resources.

“Virtualization has been a big win for our customers and our company,” said Chapman. “The cost and time required to implement new business initiatives used to be so great that we were often forced to delay implementation. Thanks to VMware, that’s no longer the case. We can turn our creative ideas into reality quickly and easily because the budget and resources associated with virtualized applications are so reasonable. We can shave seven to ten days off rollout schedules just from simplified troubleshooting alone.”