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Clydesdale Bank still using Windows XP machines for key applications

Bank reveals huge use of virtual machines from Compellent

Clydesdale Bank is still using Windows XP on around 10 to 15 percent of machines
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FRANKFURT: Clydesdale Bank is still in the process of moving from Windows XP machines to Windows 7, despite support for the operating system ending on 8 April.

Speaking at the Dell Enterprise Forum, storage manager for Clydesdale Bank Alisdair Philp said the firm has now migrated around 80 to 90 percent of its hardware estate from Windows XP to Windows 7, with guidance from Dell.

“At the moment we are doing our Windows XP to [Windows] 7 migration with Dell providing the professional services for that,” he said.

He explained that the remaining XP machines were in place to support bespoke applications. “These are applications that we couldn’t run in any other environment so we have had to fire up some new virtual desktops on XP to support these applications as we work out our exit plan from there,” he said.

Philp said the machines are behind a firewall to boost their protection, but acknowledged the risk of continuing to use machines running XP. “It was a business case we had to make,” he added.

Below we discuss some of the major threats and issues firms still using XP need to consider as the support from Microsoft has now ended.

The work with Dell comes amid a longer ongoing relationship between the two firms, as the bank had been using Compellent servers both before and after the acquisition by Dell in 2011.

Clydesdale had moved the majority of its storage requirements to Compellent and away from EMC and Oracle since 2008 for several reasons, including to save money. Since then it has pushed heavily into the use of virtualised machines, as Philp explained.

“We now virtualise severs by default so we have lots of virtual machines in production and for test and development, whereas previously we would have had physical boxes,” he said.

“We are burning through two terabytes on virtual machines a month on Compellent. The explosion in data is definitely there to see and I can’t see that changing any time soon.”

This will be music to the ears of Dell executives, who unveiled new tools designed to help firms meet the growing pressures caused by exploding data, including its new Fluid Cache for SAN tool that can retrieve data at rapid speeds.

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