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While others talk about how utility computing and a services orientation could affect IT delivery, Wachovia Bank is a living demonstration. The financial services giant, which controls assets of about $541 billion, wins membership to the 2006 Enterprise All-Star Award list for its application virtualization project.

Completed in May, this is the latest effort in an ongoing virtualization strategy, says Tony Bishop, senior vice president and director of product management for Wachovia, in Charlotte, N.C. The project relies on DataSynapse's FabricServer, which distances Java applications from application servers so they can be parceled out onto any available application server at run-time.

The project flowed naturally from five years of advanced network work. Wachovia became one of the first commercial users to deploy business applications on a grid-computing architecture with the implementation of DataSynapse GridServer (and consequently became one of the vendor's institutional investors). By 2005, the grid had become Wachovia's standard application server. Today it operates on 3,000 dedicated engines with an additional 5,000 CPUs that can be tapped as needed, Bishop says.

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Which should come first, the grid or the app virtualization?

All this is the basis for Wachovia's service-oriented infrastructure (SOI), which Bishop likens to an IT utility. For example, when a trader accesses an application, the SOI distributes, brokers and manages the various services involved in the application, ensuring that each service meets performance and business objectives. When traders are asking to price deals, "you want to give a higher-margin deal better service," Bishop says. "GridServer and FabricServer become the mechanisms that let us do that across distributed and transactional applications."

In all, for every $1 invested in the SOI, Wachovia reports a $3 to $4 return.