Reduce escalating support costs and improve resilience and disaster recovery by stopping and reversing the proliferation of servers.
Done.
Nationwide adopted a “scale-up” strategy for database servers and consolidated SQL Server applications using ES7000 servers running Windows 2000 Datacenter Server in an EMC storage environment. With fewer systems to oversee, the company now enjoys simplified management and control, improved levels of security and resilience and a 35-percent reduction in TCO.
 |
 |
Unisys & Nationwide Building Society (.WMV, 1:35) |
Situation
Nationwide is the largest building society in the world and one of the leading financial services providers in the UK and a top five mortgage lender. It has 10 million members and over £85 billion in assets. Nationwide is a mutually owned organization that belongs to its members, and is run for their benefit. This mutual status makes Nationwide different from banks, and is key to delivering superior service and better value to its members (customers).
An IT powerhouse, Nationwide has long led the market with technology innovation. An enthusiastic adopter of Microsoft Windows, it has been quick to take advantage of the high speed at which new developments can be undertaken using lower-cost technologies. Nationwide was the first to launch an Internet banking service in the UK, first to have an Internet banking service available through TV and offered Europe’s first Pocket PC PDA mobile banking service. In addition, Nationwide is one of the few providers that offer WAP access to Internet banking.
Today Nationwide has around 2,000 servers of which approximately 400 are in production, 1,000 are deployed in retail sites and the remaining servers are in test and development. More server applications are being developed, so the problem is growing all the time. The increasing significance of e-business has turned many of these systems into critical links in the delivery of customer service. The result? An increasing number of separate servers needing management and maintenance as well as requiring disaster recovery strategies and back-up solutions.
Nationwide has already consolidated its entire head office server estate into a single data center. This center is now nearing capacity and anticipated growth means that space will run out before the end of 2003. Arthur Amos, Head of Technology Support at Nationwide: “Even if we did extend the data center, we wouldn’t be addressing the issues of growth rate or manageability. We would effectively be spending to postpone a problem that will inevitably recur. In the meantime, we also have to consider the disaster recovery implications. How do you fail-over 400 separate servers to a remote location? Then there is the question of cost. Managing hundreds of servers is an incredibly expensive business.”
Solution
According to Amos, “We investigated the possibility of undertaking a major consolidation project on our existing estate of servers. Server consolidation in the UNIX world is not uncommon and the benefits are well documented. We believed that we could see a similar return in the Windows world if the right technology was out there.”
For Nationwide, consolidating the estate of servers holds out the promise of:
- a stop to the server explosion
- a single, manageable environment that can be controlled, secured and backed up
- a reduction in the huge amount of space taken up by the existing server estate
shorter time from development to live, stable running - no more wasted resources locked into dedicated servers running at a fraction of their potential
- no risk of servers running too close to their maximum potential capacity for reliable service to be assured
- improved disaster recovery capability.
Nationwide chose a solution from Unisys and Microsoft. Arthur Amos: “Unisys is one of a handful of companies that really do understand the data center. They also have the most viable technology–the ES7000 with Windows Server.”
Nationwide decided to develop both a scale-out and a scale-up strategy: scale-out for application and Web services based on blade servers, and scale-up for data/database services based on the ES7000 and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server.
Arthur Amos: “The nub of our issue is proliferation. The cost of managing servers is nothing to do with their shape and everything to do with the number of different instances of the operating system. The more separate systems to be managed, the harder it gets.”
“The high availability of the ES7000 and the EMC storage solution meant that we didn’t have to rely on clustering so our systems could be simpler and more resilient. We had fewer separate systems to manage and we could use the same tools to control them as for our other large-scale systems.”
The Unisys ES7000 is a 32-Intel processor powerhouse that is often referred to as the Wintel Mainframe. Four times the size of the nearest competitor, it runs standard Windows software and applications out of the box. Unisys is the market leader in data center Windows technology, and it was able to wrap its SystemFlow framework around each step of the implementation to ensure the project stayed on time and under budget.
The project team included technology consultants from Unisys, Microsoft and Nationwide.
Cost-savings benefits
Nationwide appreciated the technical benefits of the ES7000 and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server approach to server consolidation, but it still had to be sure that the costs stacked up.
Arthur Amos: “When we did the cost of ownership analysis we were very keen to ensure we worked on worst-case figures. We allowed no cost savings for headcount and assumed that each ES7000 would replace 30 smaller servers whereas, in practice, our target is closer to 50. We also excluded any costs for extending or rebuilding the data center.”
The comparison was made between twelve 8-processor systems, three ES7000s, and using commodity servers as before. The cost calculation included:
- hardware costs
- software license costs
- systems management software costs
- storage connectivity
- network infrastructure
- third-party chargeable implementation costs
- maintenance costs for the hardware, software and systems management
- a hardware upgrade in years three, four and five.
Arthur Amos: “The cheapest option was the ES7000 and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server solution–a full 35-percent cheaper over five years than using commodity technology.”
Strategic benefits
Arthur Amos: “We now have a better development environment and a more structured approach to disaster recovery. Five years ago, a typical project needed one or two servers. Today, 20 or more are not uncommon. We have been able to draw a line in the sand. All new SQL database development will now happen on the ES7000 and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server platform.
“More importantly, we can now look at deploying new applications in our Windows data center. The Unisys ES7000 uses standard Microsoft and Intel components, and that translates into a strong cost advantage. Because we are dealing with personal finance, we have to be certain that we can deliver new services very fast and with extremely high levels of security and resilience. The Windows data center allows us to do just that.”
Microsoft Windows has been good for Nationwide. Arthur Amos: “The ES7000 server consolidation project was particularly rewarding because it turned a problem into a competitive advantage for us and vindicated our faith in Windows technology.”
Unisys ES7000 Orion Series Servers
Today’s business environments demand 24x7 availability, fast disaster recovery, stable operations, and flexible processing capabilities–all in a cost-effective IT environment. With models supporting up to 32 processors, 128GB of memory in a dual-domain configuration, and 96 I/O slots, Unisys ES7000 Orion series servers offer a highly available, scalable, and robust platform to sustain business continuity, accommodate growth, and respond to changing customer requirements.
These 32- or 64-bit enterprise servers extend the benefits of Cellular MultiProcessing to make an ideal solution for mission-critical application and server consolidation while offering a better price-performance alternative to UNIX based servers. At the same time, their mainframe-class reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) characteristics make these systems an excellent Windows platform for critical applications and large-scale databases needing room for growth. For example, the ES7000 Orion 200 server delivers the highest levels of power, availability, and price-performance for Microsoft operating environments, including Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server.
The ES7000 Orion 200 can employ a mix of three different Intel processors–Intel Pentium III Xeon, Intel Xeon processors MP, and Intel Itanium processors–and six different operating systems that will run in up to eight independent partitions concurrently. All ES7000 servers are delivered with Unisys Server Sentinel self-monitoring and self-healing systems management software for improved manageability and responsiveness.
