Case Studies

Business Challenge: A UK-based credit card payment processing hub required 24/7 availability, 365 days a year. However, as the price of power and cooling increased year-on-year, maintaining availability with its legacy hardware soon became uneconomical. To reduce IT spend whilst maintaining high availability, they needed to implement a consolidated, virtualised server platform with excellent faulttolerance.

Solution: Two IBM® BladeCenter® chassis have been installed, each with six Intel® Xeon® processor-based HS21 and HS22 blade servers. The servers are connected to two IBM System Storage® N3400 Network Attached Storage units. A legacy payment processing application runs on two of the blades, while the rest are virtualised with VMware VSphere 4.1 and run Microsoft Windows Server. The second of the organisation's three data centres is currently receiving the same technical upgrade as the primary site. A mirror image of IBM hardware and payment software is currently in testing prior to replacing the legacy systems.

"Ultimately, we settled on the IBM solution, as Celerity's proposed server architecture and technical expertise impressed us the most, and the low annual service costs suggested that IBM hardware might be more reliable than competitors' products."

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Business challenge: A UK-based designer of water treatment modules for offshore oil platforms had a malfunctioning legacy system. Their 24/7 workflow process demanded a highly available IT platform for the smooth running of the business, but two days of IT downtime had cost the company a significant amount. The company wanted to refresh its server landscape to ensure high reliability, scalability, and performance.

Solution:  IBM Premier Business Partner Celerity were engaged to create a new infrastructure. The organisation chose to implement IBM® System x3650 and x3550 servers alongside a fully loaded IBM BladeCenter® HS22, linked to an IBM System Storage® DS3500. An IBM System x® server and IBM System Storage TS3200 tape library provide data backup, managed by CommVault software. Celerity also trained VWS on VMware, which the company chose to implement on two blades.

"Even with all our file servers and databases running, we still have seven blades of spare capacity. Thanks to IBM and Celerity, we’ve gained the confidence to meet our IT challenges for the foreseeable future.”

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Business challenge:  An electricity distribution network operator's existing server and storage landscape was due for a refresh, providing an opportunity to rationalise and simplify the entire infrastructure. The top priority was to ensure that in case of disaster at the company’s main data centre, core systems could be restored within a single working day.

Solution:    Celerity, an IBM Premier Business Partner, helped the network operator to consolidate 15 servers onto just five 
 new IBM® Power® 750 machines and migrate 15 TB of data from existing disk arrays onto a pair of IBM XIV®
 Storage Systems. The two XIVs are mirrored between the company’s two data centres, enabling rapid failover in
 case of disaster. Subsequently, following a major corporate acquisition, the server and storage environments
 were expanded to support more users and larger volumes of data.

“Celerity is one of our preferred IT suppliers, and they had done a good job on several other smaller projects, so when they proposed a solution that was both simpler and cheaper than the competition, we were confident that they could deliver.”

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"There's really no one-size-fits-all when we look at financing a client’s IT solution. I think it's important that we can provide the flexibility for a client’s total IT financing needs’……Most clients really want to look at projects from an affordability perspective: they don't want a temporary budget issue, or cash flow to be the inhibitor for a strategic investment. Financing can help them to get started on a business transformation or a technology transition."

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