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, their existing data center infrastructure was not able to scale cost-effectively or reliably to meet application demand. A new solution was needed.
FreshDirect: Online Transaction Processing
Explosive growth
When legacy data center equipment could no longer handle its rapid expansion, FreshDirect evaluated PAN Manager® Software by Egenera®. Among the immediate and quantifiable benefits the company has achieved since deploying PAN Manager are lower TCO, a better customer experience, more efficient utilization of resources, unprecedented scalability and rapid upgrades. For example, the company saved $1.2 million the first year alone. Additionally, software upgrades that once took five hours and required a system shutdown are now performed in less than 30 minutes with no customer impact.
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.
Today, thanks to Egenera, their 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, slashed server-configuration time from two days to one hour, and reduced floor-space requirements by 60 percent.
Faster turnaround time for new services and products
Digital China Financial Software chose Egenera® solutions to achieve server consolidation, simplify its IT architecture, and enable simplified systems management.
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 PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® 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 PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® to drive its global order-routing application system 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 their prior infrastructure architecture.
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.
Standard Chartered
Pooled resources, repurposed as needed
IT architects at Standard Chartered PLC had decided to centralize data center operations for its core retail-banking application, which is available to customers at 1,200 locations worldwide. After evaluating other vendor offerings, Standard Chartered selected PAN Manager® Software by Egenera®. Egenera was the only vendor with an integrated solution for infrastructure virtualization and management, and the only one with customer references and a proven product. As a result, Standard Chartered has cut total cost of ownership in half compared to their previous proprietary solution and can now bring a new country online in nine days rather than 45 as estimated for its legacy architecture.
Trading Hosting Provider: Utility Hosting
Book-to-bill time slashed by 66 percent
This financial ASP engaged Egenera Professional Services to accelerate the business and technical adoption of a utility model for its advanced electronic trading system.
The incumbent computing infrastructure 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.
PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® eliminated these problems by delivering failover capabilities, increasing reliability, simplifying the 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. Compared to the previous infrastructure, PAN Manager enabled 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. Their new x86 servers running Linux® and PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® were 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 PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® to manage the infrastructure for their new 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 PAN Manager, including $1 million in initial capital costs. Equally significant, Egenera is 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 a virtualized infrastructure based on industry-standard servers and PAN Manager® Software by Egenera®. 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 server, enabling IT to create test systems on servers otherwise used for failover. PAN Manager 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 Healthcare Payment Solutions needed to upgrade its data center infrastructure to maintain market leadership. The company evaluated solutions from several leading vendors and chose PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® for its unique virtualization capabilities. PAN Manager has demonstrated quantifiable improvements in availability, performance, flexibility, management, and cost savings.
SCBIT: Data Center Virtualization
Less complexity, more flexibility
SCBIT chose PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® over solutions from IBM® and Sun® Microsystems for its ability to simplify consolidation, virtualization and management; reduce application time to market; and lower data center costs. PAN Manager provides the flexible allocation and repurposing that SCBIT requires: The agency can run any of its 10-plus applications on any server at any time. PAN Manager 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 servers with PAN Manager 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 UNIX® servers to industry-standard servers running Linux® and PAN Manager® Software by Egenera®. Initially, IT considered building a virtualized environment by combining virtualization and management point-products. They discovered, however, that resulting complexity would be overwhelming. Servers from the industry’s largest vendors were also ruled out since their legacy architectures made virtualization and resource sharing impossible. Today, using industry-standard servers and PAN Manager, Albridge can run any application on any server at any time based on demand.
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.
Panasonic Electric Works Information Systems: Internet Data Center Services
Consolidation, HA and DR
Panasonic Electric Works Information Systems Co., Ltd. (PEW-IS) has chosen PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® to consolidate servers and reduce floor-space requirements. Along with enabling server consolidation, PAN Manager is delivering superior high availability and disaster recovery. Applications running in the data center include an order-processing service for the manufacturing industry, a content delivery system and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Based on proven results, PEW-IS has designated PAN Manager as its standard infrastructure virtualization management software for mission-critical processing.
SAVVIS: Global IT Utility
Up to 70 percent savings
In 2004, SAVVIS set a goal to become the industry’s first totally virtualized utility computing data center, integrating virtualized servers, storage, networks, and security into an end-to-end solution. Today, the service provider houses 1,425 virtual servers running on 70 industry-standard servers, 370 terabytes of 3PAR® storage and 1,250 virtualized firewalls.
As a complement to its managed hosting and collocation business, the company has built huge, scalable service platforms that can be leveraged by multiple clients with full security. This utility approach enables SAVVIS to charge customers for resources more closely tailored to their actual needs. Each year, more revenues and profits are generated from utility hosting contracts with business and government customers ranging from start-up entrepreneurs to the largest enterprises in the world, enabling SAVVIS to compete and win against traditional hosting providers and outsourcers.
Non-profit: Utility Computing
Flexible data center infrastructure
Recently, this non-profit selected PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® to manage its document archive and retrieval system based on its vision for the future and plans for growth. Of the alternatives considered, only PAN Manager was designed for data center virtualization- meeting IT's primary goal to increase the flexibility of data center infrastructure. Today, Egenera is enabling the customer to simplify high availability, improve application performance and support a dedicated test environment for the first time.
Telecommunications Carrier
IT service delivery through utility computing
As one of the world's leading telecommunications companies, 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 and found that industry-standard computing platforms along with PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® software offered the best cost savings, time to market, resource utilization, data center simplicity, application availability, and IT process improvement.
Farm Bureau - Western Computer Services: Building a Service-Based Architecture
100% uptime
Western Computer Services, Inc. (WCS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Farm Bureau Financial Services (FBFS), has deployed PAN Manager® Software by Egenera® as the foundation for its new service-based architecture, serving multiple Farm Bureau Financial Services companies throughout the United States. After an extensive evaluation spanning some of the industry's largest systems companies, Farm Bureau-WCS chose Egenera to power the delivery and management of Web-based insurance services to thousands of personal and commercial insurance customers.
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