Sirtex Medical Ltd adopts virtual strategy as foundation for growth
Sirtex Medical Ltd is a publicly listed Australian organisation operating within the highly specialised field of medical research and development. The company’s primary objective is to research, develop and commercialise effective treatments for liver cancer using novel small particle technology. Its Selective Internal Radiation Therapy is used to treat patients throughout the world. In 2008-09 Sirtex reported a 72 percent increase in revenues, achieving record results across Europe, the United States and Asia Pacific. In 2009-2010, the company plans to increase its reach through selective
expansion into new markets within Latin America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Sirtex is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and employs 65 people worldwide.
Problems
Sirtex is a medium sized business that has been growing at a rate of approximately 40 percent annually for the past half decade. Five years ago it turned over less than $10 million per year. Now it’s achieving more than $60 million. Consistent growth also brings its own challenges, as Darren Smith, Sirtex Chief Financial Officer, notes, “One of the effects is that it translates into IT activity and into an increasing number of transactions going through the business systems.”
As demand on the company’s ageing IT infrastructure grew, performance and reliability started to become issues. The Sydney data centre, which supports all of Sirtex’s international operations, began to experience a number of failures each week. The servers were responsible for delivering core applications including Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Citrix which enabled remote and international staff to access the systems. Smith says, “While none of the failures were catastrophic, they were occurring frequently enough to be an irritation to the business.”
Faced with the need to replace a number of servers, Smith decided to instigate a complete IT infrastructure review. “Rather than simply continuing to replace hardware and put in bigger pieces of equipment, we decided to look for a world’s best practice solution that would give us the flexibility we needed for future growth.”
Solution
Having been faced with a similar situation in a previous company, Smith was well aware of the options and was keen to investigate whether a virtualisation strategy would be suitable for Sirtex. Virtualisation is a process that involves tapping into unused computing capacity, spreading demand across all available servers. It’s an effective way of reducing the need for numerous separate physical hardware boxes, and of reducing the resources and space required to support the computing environment.
Most importantly, Smith saw that virtualisation could deliver additional redundancy to Sirtex’s core systems, protecting the company from outages or server failures. It would also enable the company to add to its computing power without interrupting the operations of the business. “Virtualisation meant that we wouldn’t have to pull down a whole server to add functionality, space or processing capabilities to the system.”
Smith approached Sirtex’s IT service provider, Professional Advantage, to seek advice. Professional Advantage was well acquainted with Sirtex’s IT environment, having assisted in the deployment of the Microsoft Dynamics AX core systems four years earlier. Smith also knew that Professional Advantage had recently undertaken its own virtualisation project and was confident that if an IT-savvy company was moving in this direction, it must be the best approach.
Professional Advantage agreed that creating virtual servers would deliver the reliability, redundancy and flexibility that Sirtex was looking for. It recommended a solution based on Microsoft Server Virtualisation technology. Smith comments, “We run a Microsoft environment so it made sense to keep that consistency across our whole portfolio of applications. We had no real qualms. My previous experience had addressed any concerns and we knew that the technology was tried and tested. We’re a medical company and we don’t want to be pioneers in the IT world. Selecting Microsoft suited us because it offered best practice for IT, but it was still a fairly low risk strategy.”
Implementation
Implementation involved the replacement of five old physical servers with 3 new host servers running 12 virtual servers, including a separate 2-node Microsoft SQL Server cluster, utilising fast shared storage. The new hardware was deployed within the same cabinet as the original servers, providing the required system expansion without demanding additional physical space. Thorough planning helped to ensure a fairly seamless deployment of the new technology and provided an opportunity to review the organisation’s application requirements. Smith says, “Just the sheer fact that we had
to identify all our applications before switching to new servers gave us the chance to step back and to ask if these were the most appropriate applications given our way forward.
“Everything we knew about went to plan but we did discover a couple of little things about our system set-up that we were unaware of. One benefit of the deployment was that it allowed us to identify such gaps in our own procedures and security, and then to rectify them,” he adds.
Results
Smith sees virtualisation as the first step in Sirtex’s renewed IT strategy. “It has provided us with the groundwork from which we can start to move forward.” Next, he plans to review and bring greater consistency to desktop hardware before finally reviewing and streamlining applications.
“Sirtex is progressing from adolescence into young adulthood,” Smith observes. “As we grow, the importance of process becomes more and more important. There’s a need to ensure that the focus of the business is consistent as opposed to relying on individual interpretation of the strategy. IT will be the main facilitator in delivering that consistency.
Smith concludes, “However, I’m just an accountant with a limited understanding of how IT fits together. We’ve placed a considerable amount of trust in Professional Advantage in the past and as we further develop our IT capabilities, I can see we will continue to have a heavy reliance on the support and advice that they can provide well into the future.”