All change please!

Simon Gay believes data centre infrastructures are ripe for consolidation

Financial services companies are increasingly having to tackle complex systems migration projects. We look at the drivers, challenges and benefits – and advise on how you can make your next migration a success.

Increased customer demand, new legislation and flexible working are just some of the factors that are helping to redefine the shape of the UK’s financial services industry – and its use of IT. Ensuring that corporate systems can keep pace with such change poses IT departments in the sector with a sizeable challenge, and will often demand the deployment of new technology.

Maximising the value of these new systems, while also safeguarding business continuity and IT performance, requires not only a breadth of skills but also considerable resources during the initial migration.

Balancing these demands – and budget constraints – can prove too great for some organisations, which will often result in the project failing to deliver the promised business benefits or planned return on investment.

According to the Standish Group, three-quarters of large IT projects are classed as failures, which has massive implications for a company’s profitability, productivity and the morale of its staff.

IT transformation
Mastering how to manage IT change successfully is essential for financial services companies, as there are a number of drivers that will result in the need to migrate to new systems in the near future – especially in the data centre environment.

Data centre consolidation injects new life into National Blood Service

Every year the National Blood Service collects, tests, processes, stores and issues around 2.5 million blood donations. Every single one of these samples has to be individually screened, identified and logged as it passes through each stage of the process from donor to recipient. Keeping track of where these samples are, and how they have been processed, is managed by a complex IT system called PULSE, which also handles the blood service’s online appointment booking system. Until recently, PULSE was running on legacy infrastructure, a factor that called for some serious consideration when the decision was taken to rationalise the organisation’s IT architecture. As Andrew O’Connor, Systems Engineering and Operations Manager for the National Blood Service, explains: “Our data centres were distributed across the UK, with each centre serving one of our three operational regions. We knew that this was not ideal, for performance or support, so decided to examine our options for consolidating them.” Rather than undergo a complete platform refresh, the National Blood Service opted to implement a new server and storage infrastructure across a single logical data centre. This meant not only integrating new technology, such as an HP-based SAN and backup solution, but also migrating core data. The data centre environment is mission-critical to the blood service and patients across the country, so it was essential that the migration did not result in any unplanned downtime or disruption to the business. Using GCat [the government’s IT procurement catalogue], the blood service asked Computacenter to provide a project plan and a scope of activities. “The project was complex, so having a single service provider throughout was of paramount importance and ensured smooth progress,” comments Andrew. The critical nature of the data centre and the PULSE system meant that the new infrastructure had to be extremely resilient, with no single point of failure. In addition to guaranteeing availability, the new infrastructure is also helping to improve service delivery. Thanks to the consolidation, the blood service has been able to ensure it has the right technology foundations for new services, such as its donor management system. This system went live only a week after the migration, so the schedule for the roll-out – which was both completed on time and in budget – was exceptionally tight. “We now have an extremely reliable and resilient infrastructure. We are already seeing the returns we sought, and we are delivering a substantially improved service to our customers,” comments Andrew.

Richard Gadd, Financial Services Enterprise Business Director for Computacenter, comments: “IT departments in the sector are under growing pressure to reduce their operational costs, while also increase systems availability and ensure good governance. Trying to achieve this with a legacy or non-standardised data centre infrastructure is simply not feasible on a long-term basis, as it only serves to increase the costs and complexity associated with ongoing systems management. What’s more, such an environment will often result in unpredictable and unmeasured IT services, and be unable to deliver the dynamic IT that is now required by financial services companies.”

An infrastructure that fails to utilise consolidation and virtualisation techniques will also require a much larger footprint, a key consideration for companies when relocating to new premises – as many financial services firms are currently doing. Upgrading or relocating data centre systems, however, is a massive undertaking, as the likes of the National Blood Service (see panel) and Lehman Brothers discovered when they embarked on major migration projects with help from Computacenter.

No pain, no gain
Despite the potential risks, the benefits of migrating to a new data centre infrastructure can be myriad – from enhanced security and service levels to reduced costs and improved efficiency.

As Simon Gay, Computacenter’s Consultancy Practice Leader, explains:
“Data centres have seen significant growth over recent years through‘stove-pipe’ application deployment. As a result, the infrastructure is often spread over a number of locations and is ripe for both consolidation and standardisation. Rationalising server volumes and limiting the number of operating systems helps not only reduce costs, but also the complexity of providing IT support. Combine this with such technologies, as virtualisation, and an organisation can start to reap considerable financial savings.”

Before financial services companies can start to benefit from such strategies, however, they need to undertake extensive planning to ensure a successful migration.

Understanding and auditing existing systems is fundamental to this success, as Steve O’Donnell, Vice President for Infrastructure Transition Programmes at Cable & Wireless, explains: “To manage risk, it is essential that a company understands what is being migrated. Data centres are highly complex environments, and there is often a lack of information about both interdependencies and configurations.” This audit process often ends up as a voyage of discovery, with various applications and systems coming out of the woodwork. In the case of Cable and Wireless, it identified 175 applications with no business owner, more than 160 orphan servers, and countless unnecessary software licences.

Minimising disruption
Following such an assessment, financial services companies then need to get to grips with a number of other issues, such as aligning the project to business requirements, mitigating risk, planning and scheduling the migration, establishing the return on investment and validating new technology.

“Any IT migration project will come with a degree of risk, but when that migration involves core systems and applications, then the potential for business disruption and systems downtime is much higher,” comments Simon. “Computacenter has a wealth of experience in infrastructure integration across multiple platforms, and takes a very pragmatic approach to migration projects. This not only minimises the potential for business disruption, but also ensures companies make the most of their new environments post-migration.”

Computacenter’s approach will also ensure that the data centre infrastructure is primed for initiatives, such as grid and utility computing, and that the necessary provisioning and monitoring functionality exists to enable flexible costing structures.

Windows of change
The data centre, however, is not the only current target for migration projects. Financial services firms are also having to migrate their desktops and data to new operating systems and applications to keep pace with both business and technological change.

Once again, this process will often involve mission critical applications and pose a potential threat to business continuity. Upgrading messaging infrastructures has become particularly fraught, as email access is not only essential to productivity but must also withstand regulatory scrutiny.

To help companies overcome some of the challenges associated with upgrading desktops, servers and email systems to new environments, Computacenter has developed a series of best practice migration packages. These are designed to help reduce the time and costs associated with migration programmes, and are specifically suited to popular Microsoft platforms, such as Windows XP and Exchange 2003.

Shipbuilding firm VT Group used Computacenter’s Rapid Exchange Migration service when it had to cope with a substantial email roll-out that involved more than 150 sites, 4,500 users and one million messages.

Paul Freemantle, Director of IT Service Delivery for VT Group, comments: “This was a very critical and visible project, and its success was essential for business continuity. We had not attempted such a large-scale messaging project before, and lacked the breadth of skills in-house on the different platforms involved.”

By working with Computacenter, VT Group was able to draw on a pool of experienced resources, to ensure that it minimised the migration risks while also maximising the benefits of the new messaging infrastructure.

“Migrating systems and data is an extremely complex process, but with thorough preparation and the use of industry best practices, it is a process that can be managed successfully – and with excellent results,” comments Simon.