Running out of datacentre space has become a common feature among enterprise organisations as of late and thinking of ways to redesign the facility can prove to be quite a handful.
When South African-based banking house, Investec Bank, ran out of room they chose global outsourcer, Unisys, to help find a solution to its space eating problem.
Investec has more than 6000 employees globally including offices in the UK and Australia and has its sights set on standardising its IT strategy on an international scale. Locally the company has a presence in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. It had about 70 servers sitting in its datacentre and was at maximum capacity.
Scaling down
Unisys A/NZ infrastructure management suite services leader, Ben Robinson, said Investec had a global objective to standardise its server, storage and backup environments.
“They were feeling the pressure with floor space, as a lot of organisations are today,” he said.
“That was one of their main pain points, but they were really after business flexibility and the ability to reduce their energy requirements.”
Robinson said Investec had about 70 servers in its core production space which were critical to its business.
“What we were doing was helping them to standardise, consolidate and simplify their environment,” he said.
The Unisys team initially analysed Investec’s overall server environment and how it could consolidate and virtualise its environment.
“We designed a new virtual environment taking into account not just the technology side, because it was production environment that was critical, but also looking at both the people and the processes involved,” Robinson said. “Globally, Investec were going down the virtualisation path. They determined through some vigorous testing that going to a scale-up type system was going to give them better performance and utilisation than more commodity scale-out systems.”
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