Case Studies

Investec Bank South Africa Readies Itself for the Future

In global organizations, the effective management and delivery of IT services is critical to sustaining a worldwide market presence that promotes growth and innovation.

For Investec Bank, a specialist banking group operating in South Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom, this concept crystallised when the company realised its current server infrastructure was not positioned to support ongoing strategic initiatives. As a result, Investec Bank South Africa’s Central IT department decided to transform its server environment into an asset that could provide greater visibility into resource consumption and create a predictable financial model that would help control costs.

“Infrastructure expenditures were trending toward an unsustainable point,” explains Jason Brand, infrastructure architect for Investec. “In response, we formed an initiative that would evolve Central IT into a strategic service provider with a core server infrastructure that maximises flexibility and effectiveness, and delivers a computing platform that drives strategic initiatives in future years.”

Called Project Genesis, this multi-year programme signalled a philosophical shift that focussed on leveraging consolidation and virtualisation to establish a services-led, real-time infrastructure.

Prior to launching this initiative, Investec enlisted the help of Unisys, whose Enterprise Consolidation Roadmap service created the business case for Project Genesis.

The insight delivered by this service, coupled with a reputation for delivering large-scale enterprise virtualization deployments, made Unisys the ideal partner to guide such a revolutionary project.

“We chose Unisys because they shared our vision of a real-time infrastructure, provided coverage across our jurisdictions and possessed the technology and discipline to manage a project of this magnitude,” Jason Brand says.

Metrics

• Costs: Reduced expenditures, including the elimination of 4-5 servers per month, and achieved a stable, predictable financial model
• Reliability: Increased infrastructure availability from 79% to 99%
• Energy: Reduced electricity requirements of consolidated servers by 85%
• Recoverability: Improved the manageability and effectiveness of business continuity measures

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