Case Studies
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Companies in a wide variety of industries face common business challenges: improving response time, increasing processing capacity, managing costs, facilitating ease of management and improving scalability. Here are some of the challenges Egenera has solved.
eCommerce: UNIX Replacement
Costs reduced by 50 percent
This Egenera customer was faced with a good problem to have. Demand for its online commerce service had reached one million transactions per hour and was growing by more than 10 percent each month. But, the existing hardware infrastructure was not able to scale cost-effectively or reliably to meet application demand. A new architecture was needed.
FreshDirect: Online Transaction Processing
Explosive growth
When legacy data center equipment could no longer handle its rapid expansion, FreshDirect evaluated the Egenera® BladeFrame® system. Immediate, quantifiable benefits the company has achieved since deploying the BladeFrame include lower TCO, a better customer experience, more efficient utilization of resources, unprecedented scalability and rapid upgrades.
STA Travel: Utility Computing
Comptetitive Advantage
With more than 50,000 hits to its Web site each day, STA Travel operates 400 offices in 90 countries and has over six million customers. The company wanted a flexible, scaleable and resilient IT infrastructure to maintain a competitive advantage in the travel sector. Its needs are being met by Savvis and the Egenera BladeFrame system.
Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ: Server Consolidation
Lower TCO
By combining server consolidation with organizational restructuring, The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Ltd. is lowering data center TCO and streamlining management. Applications previously run on proprietary UNIX systems are now run on the BladeFrame in an open computing environment. Moreover, the bank uses the Egenera system as a general-purpose grid that allocates appropriate resources to applications as needed. Today, getting a new server online takes just minutes.
Commerzbank NA: Disaster Recovery
Security and simplicity through data center virtualization
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Commerzbank NA launched an initiative to enhance its disaster-recovery strategy. The goal was to deploy a pool of virtualized servers that could run UNIX or Microsoft® Windows® on demand, to complement the flexibility already achieved with virtualization on the storage and network sides. The bank chose the Egenera BladeFrame system powered by AMD OpteronTM processors.
Today, the DR site not only ensures business continuity, it plays an active role in daily computing requirements—notably improving utilization. Moreover, Commerzbank NA has consolidated 140 legacy servers into just 48 Egenera blades, reduced the time to run reports from three hours to one hour, slashed server-configuration time from two days to one hour, and reduced floor-space requirements by 60 percent.
Daiwa Securities: Server Consolidation
Scalability and flexibility through virtualization
Daiwa Securities is leveraging the Egenera BladeFrame as the infrastructure for its strategic information systems to consolidate servers and meet future application enhancements. Daiwa selected the Egenera platform for its scalability, unique virtualization technology and open architecture, which accommodates a variety of peripheral devices.
Investment Bank: Corporate Performance/Valuation Modeling
ROI in second year
This major financial-services firm needed to ensure that it was supplying timely, accurate information to its fund managers and premier customers. To achieve this goal, the bank needed to reduce processing time for aggregating data and to streamline the data center. The Egenera system enabled the firm to improve application performance and reduce time to market, and will pay for itself by the second year of operation.
Investment Bank: Equities Trading
Savings of $17M versus mainframe
For this customer, meeting the challenges of cost-efficient processing and scalability meant increasing automation by moving away from mainframe-based technologies. Utility computing has enabled the bank to take advantage of an open architecture while slashing server count and total cost of ownership (TCO). Migration to a new securities-processing platform based on BEA, Egenera and Intel technologies has lowered capital costs and headcount requirements, reduced errors and failed trades, and decreased operational risk.
Investment Bank: Order Management Architecture
Capital costs lowered by 70 percent
This global securities firm wanted to increase the throughput of its order-management system. To leverage Linux, lower capital expenditures and simplify administration-without sacrificing the high availability of its existing solution-the bank turned to Egenera. The firm estimates that selecting the Egenera BladeFrame system reduced its capital costs by 70 percent and lowered management costs by 50 percent.
Investment Bank: Order Routing
Better performance at one-fourth the cost
To improve operating efficiencies and enhance client services, this leading investment bank is using the Egenera BladeFrame system to drive its global order-routing architecture, a business-critical application accessed by thousands of users worldwide that processes some 20 million transactions per day. Results include server consolidation, better performance and total cost of ownership one-fourth that of proprietary RISC Unix systems.
kabu.com: Proprietary Trading System
Disaster recovery through virtualization
kabu.com Securities Co., Ltd. has launched Japan's first Proprietary Trading System (PTS). Because the PTS manages significant customer assets and processes dynamic transactions, business continuity is essential. The firm has deployed a virtualized, decentralized disaster recovery strategy enabled by the Egenera® BladeFrame® system.
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc.: Internal ASP
N+1 failover for mission critical services
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group's (MUFG) Comprehensive Financial Platform centralizes IT infrastructure and runs more than 50 applications on five Egenera BladeFrame systems. Whether large or small, MUFG business units all benefit from the mission-critical services and capabilities Egenera has built into its architecture.
Standard Chartered
Pooled resources, repurposed as needed
Standard Chartered PLC selected the Egenera system for its core retail-banking application, which has the bank's highest classification for business criticality, at 1,200 locations worldwide. With the bank's future in mind, Standard Chartered looked at mainframes, high-end RISC systems, x86 white boxes and blades. Egenera was the only vendor with an integrated solution for virtualization and the I/O fabric, and the only one with customer references and a proven product. Standard Chartered has cut total cost of ownership in half compared to a traditional x86 solution and can now bring a new country online in nine days rather than 45 as estimated for legacy architecture.
Trading Hosting Provider: Utility Hosting
Book-to-bill time slashed by 66 percent
The customer's incumbent server architecture lacked high availability, SAN connectivity and scalability and was unable to keep up with the company's forecasted application user growth of 200 percent per year. This legacy solution was based on the standard white box approach wherein islands of resources are deployed with little sharing and unmanageable complexity.
The Egenera BladeFrame system and its PAN ManagerTM software eliminated these problems by delivering failover capabilities, increasing reliability, simplifying infrastructure and reducing physical complexity. Compared to the previous platform, Egenera's BladeFrame allowed the client to reduce the time needed to acquire, deploy and start billing a new customer by 66 percent, creating an increased annual revenue opportunity of close to $1 million.
Government: Web Portal
Up and running in 23 days
This government customer needed rapid delivery of a low-cost, high availability infrastructure to support a national-security Web portal. The Egenera BladeFrame system was up and running in just 23 days with quantifiable reductions in both capital and management costs compared to a legacy UNIX environment.
U.S. Census Bureau: Utility Computing
Lower TCO, simplicity
A directive of the Census CIO, the Census Bureau Utility Computing Environment (CBUCE) reduces the cost and complexity of IT infrastructure by recentralizing the Bureau's IT function and replacing proprietary RISC/UNIX servers with open platforms running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows. The first step in the migration was choosing a server platform. The Bureau established a lab to evaluate systems from Sun, IBM, HP, RLX and Egenera. Egenera was selected for high-performance applications. The first to be ported, MAF/TIGER, runs on dual-core AMD Opteron processors and is being migrated to Oracle Database 10g. In addition, the Bureau is teaming with Egenera Professional Services to further accelerate its adoption of utility computing.
Cambridge Health Alliance: Ambulatory Product Suite
Doing more with less staff
Cambridge Health Alliance chose the Egenera system to run Epic Systems Corporation's ambulatory product suite in a strategic initiative to automate its ambulatory-care environment. Over a five-year period, the Alliance expects to save $2 million with Egenera, including $1 million in initial capital costs. Equally significant, Egenera is freeing up quantifiable human capital by reducing system administration requirements-enabling Alliance IT professionals to focus on activities that add real value to the user community.
Cambridge Health Alliance: Microsoft Exchange
Incredible scalability
Cambridge Health Alliance (the Alliance), a community healthcare organization, wanted to simplify its e-mail system by consolidating four server computers to one. It also sought a solution that would scale to 6,000 users and provide enhanced Web e-mail and mobile synchronization features. The IT staff considered migrating from Microsoft® Exchange Server version 5.5 to the Linux-based Scalix Mail and Calendaring Server version 9.0 because of its scalability. After evaluating Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, the staff deployed the Microsoft solution with help from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Internosis. Testing showed that Exchange Server 2003 can easily support the organization's 4,500 current users and scale to 6,000 users on one Egenera Processing Blade resource.
Emory Healthcare: Data Center Virtualization
System administration reduced 80 percent
Emory Healthcare has moved mission-critical applications from proprietary UNIX and mainframe platforms to the Egenera system. Benefits include improvements in system administration, TCO, utilization and provisioning. A system administrator can easily configure and allocate a virtual server in minutes. In addition, multiple operating systems and OS images can be run on a single blade, enabling IT to create test systems on blades otherwise used for failover. Egenera also helps ensure that patient records are preserved in accordance with government mandates.
Metavante: Performance and Reliability
25 percent reduction in server count
With annual growth of 35 to 40 percent, Metavante's Healthcare Payment Solutions division needed to upgrade data center infrastructure to maintain its market lead. The company evaluated blade systems from several leading vendors, and chose the Egenera platform for its unique virtualization capabilities. Egenera's Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture has demonstrated quantifiable improvements in availability, performance, flexibility, management and cost savings.
SCBIT: Data Center Virtualization
Less complexity, more flexibility
SCBIT chose the Egenera system over IBM and Sun for its ability to simplify consolidation, virtualization and management; reduce application time to market; and lower data center costs. Egenera provides the flexible allocation and repurposing that SCBIT requires: The agency can run any of its 10-plus applications on any blade at any time. Egenera also enables SCBIT to make every application highly available at virtually no cost and provides a unique N+1 approach to disaster recovery. Rigorous evaluation demonstrated the performance advantages of running Oracle® 10g on Egenera versus traditional systems, while a single console provides remote access, lowering administration requirements.
Albridge: Financial Application Hosting
Virtualization for competitive advantage
Albridge Solutions has migrated from proprietary RISC/UNIX servers to the Egenera BladeFrame system running LinuxTM on x86 processors. Initially, IT considered building a virtualized environment from white boxes, but found that complexity and management would be overwhelming. Blade servers from the industry's largest vendors were also ruled out since their legacy architectures made virtualization and resource sharing impossible. Today, with the Egenera BladeFrame, Albridge can run any application on any blade at any time based on demand, breaking the one application/one server model IT shops have struggled with for years.
Financial ASP: Electronic Trading Application
Dramatic Reductions in OPEX
This real-time financial ASP chose Egenera utility computing technology for its advanced electronic trading system. The incumbent server architecture lacked high availability, SAN connectivity and scalability and was unable to keep up with the company's forecasted application user growth of 200 percent per year. This legacy solution was based on the standard white box approach wherein islands of resources are deployed with little sharing and unmanageable complexity.
The Egenera BladeFrame system and its PAN Manager software eliminated these problems by delivering failover capabilities, increasing reliability, simplifying infrastructure and reducing physical complexity. Within six weeks of project initiation, the mission-critical application running Microsoft Windows 2000 was successfully ported to Windows 2003 on the BladeFrame with a 3PAR® SAN (storage area network). Compared to the previous platform, Egenera's BladeFrame allowed the ASP to reduce the time needed to provision servers for a new customer by 95 percent, creating a significant increased annual revenue opportunity.
Matsushita Electric Works Information Systems: Internet Data Center Services
Consolidation, HA and DR
Matsushita Electric Works Information Systems Co., Ltd. (MEW-IS) has chosen the Egenera BladeFrame system to consolidate servers and reduce floor-space requirements. Along with consolidation, the BladeFrame is delivering superior high availability and disaster recovery. Applications running on the Egenera platform include an order-processing service for the manufacturing industry, a content delivery system and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Based on proven results, MEW-IS has designated the Egenera BladeFrame its standard system for mission-critical processing.
SAVVIS: Global IT Utility
Up to 70 percent savings
The unique architecture of the Egenera BladeFrame system virtualizes data center infrastructure by creating a pool of server resources from which private, secured configurations can be dynamically allocated to support an application and then disbanded if necessary. With this approach, server capacity no longer must be dedicated to individual applications, and services are not tied to specific hardware or network paths. As a result, SAVVIS clients pay only for the resources they utilize and have access to powerful features such as high availability, disaster recovery and real-time scalability without the expensive over-provisioning required by legacy systems.
SK C&C: SAP
SAP Deployment
SK C&C of Korea has deployed Egenera BladeFrame systems to run SAP ERP and other mission-critical applications in a utility computing environment. The IT-services company selected the Egenera platform over blade offerings from HP and IBM based on its advanced virtualization technology and ability to simplify data center infrastructure. Other benefits include server consolidation, ease of management and lower costs.
Emory University: Rapid Deployment
Deployment slashed from three months to 10 days
Emory University has migrated Oracle9i Database running on proprietary RISC/UNIX servers to Oracle 10g RAC running on the Egenera BladeFrame system. The project, which would have taken three to six months if done in-house, was completed in just 10 days by a joint team of Oracle and Egenera integration experts through the Oracle-on-Egenera 10g Accelerator service.
Non-profit: Utility Computing
Flexible data center infrastructure
Recently, this non-profit selected the Egenera system to power its document archive and retrieval application based on its vision for the future and plans for growth. Of the alternatives considered, only Egenera was designed for data center virtualization-meeting IT's primary goal to increase the flexibility of data center infrastructure. Today, the Egenera system is enabling the customer to simplify high availability, improve application performance and support a dedicated test environment for the first time.
University of Rostock: Virtualization for Centralized Services
Flexible, fail-safe server pool
IT management found the solution they were looking for in the form of PRIMERGY BladeFrame from Fujitsu Siemens Computers. The unique virtualized server pool drastically reduces the complexity of IT infrastructures and at the same time permits dynamic reaction to changes in IT requirements and business needs.
Telecommunications: Migration and Consolidation
Utility computing saves $50 million
This top-five U.S. telecommunications company was considering blade servers to reduce data center cost and complexity. After rigorous evaluation, HP and IBM blades were eliminated from consideration based on their legacy architecture. The company then compared the Egenera BladeFrame system to rack-mounted servers and found tremendous differences in manageability and cost savings. They have standardized on Egenera for all Unix-to-Linux migration and expect to eliminate 75 percent of all servers, reduce software licenses by 80 percent and save in excess of $50 million over five years.
Telecommunications Carrier
IT service delivery through utility computing
One of the world's leading telecommunications companies, in 2003 this Egenera customer launched a corporate initiative to transform IT into a service delivery model through utility computing. The carrier conducted a thorough technology and financial evaluation of three alternatives: the Egenera BladeFrame system, the incumbent Sun® platform and a generic "white box" approach. The Egenera solution was found to offer advantages in cost savings, time to market, resource utilization, data center simplicity, application availability and IT process improvement. The deployment of Oracle® E-Business Suite on the Egenera architecture illustrates the value being derived.
Telstra: 2004 Olympic Games
Telstra leveraged Egenera's utility model to provide crucial flexibility. The Egenera platform allocates computing resources as needed and uses virtual architecture that distributes applications to the Storage Area Network (SAN), making the overall platform faster to reboot.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers: SAP
Improve performance and utilization
Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) was having problems coping with data loads during peak usage periods, especially the nightly transfer of SAP transaction data to their Business Information Warehouse. In addition, users were noticing that the reaction times for standard reports and individual analyses were slowing down. FSC decided not to let its existing static IT structures become ever more complex by simply expanding its server park. Instead, they made a commitment to a consolidated dynamic system.
Farm Bureau - Western Computer Services: Building a Service-Based Architecture
100% uptime
When Farm Bureau-WCS was building a new service-based model to service multiple Farm Bureau Financial Services companies, they turned to Egenera as the foundation for high-availability and disaster recovery, agility and flexibility, and seamless Web-based delivery of mission-critical insurance applications over a standard architecture.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers: Flexible server capacity for Siebel operations
Fujitsu Seimens Computer's Siebel application was being run on a four-year-old configuration with 40 PRIMERGY servers and had not been showing its usual levels of performance for some time. The migration to PRIMERGY BladeFrame provided a sustainable solution: the data center became much more agile, reacting immediately to changing levels of utilization. The migration of the Siebel application, which has about 2,500 users, was successfully completed in only three months.
Kjell Riise, SAP Infrastructure Manager of FMC Technologies views his company's new found agility as a decisive benefit. "The deployment of FlexFrame Infrastructure in our data center can free us from the claws of a complex IT infrastructure. We are now able to activate an additional server in a matter of minutes instead of days and we can deploy new applications very quickly." The reduction in complexity has resulted in a host of benefits since FMC Technologies has eliminated a cost driver and potential source of problems. The allocation of resources is controlled dynamically on demand, and system administration has become significantly simpler. All in all, this Norwegian technology company now benefits from both greater operational reliability and significantly lower total costs.
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