To meet a corporate goal of getting innovative financial products out the door faster, Wachovia has imagined -- and is starting to pump its $2 billion annual IT budget into -- an extraordinary IT vision that you could call "virtual everything." As part of the strategy, computers, storage, memory and networks all will be virtualized in a unified platform fabric. This will allow IT to more quickly provision desktops, servers and storage to people and applications that need them; more efficiently manage IT resources; and help save time, money and even the environment, according to Jacob Hall, head of platform design and data center technology for Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia's corporate and investment bank.

Hall explains that Wachovia is taking a three-pronged approach to achieving its vision. The first tenet, he relates, is to provision first. In other words, don't just order stuff, because inevitably you will buy more than you need. Rather, deploy on existing technology first and then order more as necessary.

The second principle is to be green by design -- trying to take the most environmentally friendly approach to every aspect of IT. And the third is to achieve high availability by default -- not necessarily by purchasing backup and continuity technology, but by building redundancy into the IT fabric.

Along the way, Hall notes, Wachovia's IT organization also is following another guiding principle: Remove two or more things and replace them with one. This has been a mantra of managing director Mark Cates, who, according to Hall, has said, "If we add one thing and remove nothing, there's no real benefit. If we add one thing and remove something, there might be some benefit. But if we add one thing and remove two things, there's significant benefit."

One area in which Wachovia already has employed this strategy is business intelligence. "We did an analysis of our reporting environment and found that we had over 15 reporting tools," recalls Hall. "We brought in two managed reporting services environments and positioned them to replace the 15 existing tools."

Another area in which the bank is consolidating is the data center. Wachovia has bought grid technology and Scalent's Virtual Operating Environment to create shared server farms and get much more work out of the servers -- in some cases, replacing two or more servers with one, Hall relates. He adds that the bank would like to replace the management of 4,000 grid operating systems with one and, wherever possible, two storage or input/output (I/O) devices with one device, two switches with one switch, two watts of power with one watt and two hours of labor with one hour.