IBM blades cut banking pain
IBM blades cut banking pain
TransAction Solutions has overcome its complications of providing IT services to Australian credit unions via a number of disparate systems by unifying all of its storage facilities through the use of IBM's new storage virtualisation technology.
TransAction Solutions provides the IT "back-office" for 12 Australian credit unions, including the largest, Australian National Credit Union.
It supports its clients' business processes; including 8 million financial transactions a month by almost 600,000 credit union members, and more than 11,000 emails per day. This amounts to 14.6 terabytes of files and 30 Web pages.
Guy Light, the TransAction Solutions general manager, explained why the company decided to buy two IBM TotalStorage Volume Controller devices alongside an IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server with 4.3 terabyte capacity and two SAN switches to cope with an increasing problem.
"We ever experiencing ever increasing data, and I would dread to think about how we would cope in five years without this system in place. Most people carry out transactions now at midnight, not midday, so we were facing a need to store much more information because of this.
"The IBM solution allows us to manage all of our different systems from one area online anywhere, so it provides us with much better flexibility. It also allows us to upgrade seamlessly, whereas upgrading disparate systems would have disrupted the activity of the end users.
"We expect to make a return on our investment in two years."
One of the key advantages for Light is that if there is a system failure, we can now recover the service in thirty minutes, instead of six hours, which was the previous downtime.
The IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller is a combined solution of customised dual IBM eServer xSeries servers running embedded Linux operating system and IBM's virtualisation software.
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