Business Challenge

An IT manager at a large regional bank needed help to design a new high performance UNIX environment and a new SAN environment, and needed it quickly.  The manager, along with a team of in-house database engineers, had recently built a data mart from scratch in just six weeks for one of the bank’s primary marketing divisions.  In doing so, they had become “victims of their own success,” and were being flooded with requests for additional data marts.  The manager recognized that the bank’s UNIX and storage environments were already working to capacity, and would need to be upgraded in order to support the performance and availability demands of additional data marts.

Solution

Forsythe had recently completed a similar project for another one of the bank’s marketing divisions.  After identifying the similarities between the two divisions’ environments, Forsythe focused on gathering and analyzing the new environment’s unique technical requirements.  Based on its findings, Forsythe proposed an overall architecture design that would combine upgrades and new technology to provide high performance, high availability, and also scalability.  The bank agreed to the design, after which a project for the deployment of the new infrastructure was presented and schedules were set.  As promised, Forsythe completed the project on time.

Results

Already, the bank has realized a 40% increase in performance with its new infrastructure.  Overall, the organization has achieved 99.999% availability, while fully supporting the significant utilization increase created by all the additional data marts.