A Diversified Global Holding Company

A diversified global holding company approached Corporate Technologies for a customized proof-of-concept before committing to significant architectural changes. One of their divisions—offering wealth management solutions—was experiencing pronounced performance, availability, and scalability issues with an outdated Dell/Intel computing environment. The company’s managed hosting division offered a low-cost, high-availability, high-performance computing option, but it was unclear if the financial application would perform well in such an environment. Differences between the current versus the proposed environments were so substantial—32-bit SQL versus 64-bit SQL cluster, physical versus managed servers, mid-size data center versus enterprise-class data center—that a proof-of-concept was required to validate the feasibility of migrating the application to the managed hosting division.

Corporate Technologies near-replicated our client’s enterprise-class virtualized data center in our Technology Lab, and meticulously tested the wealth management application. One of the biggest challenges we faced was security due to information sensitivity. We provided our client secure remote access and—because their entire business resided in our Lab—we set up protocols to lock ourselves out of their data, and to 100% scrub all data before systems got shipped to the client hosting location.

Our proof-of-concept demonstrated that the application would run flawlessly in the proposed infrastructure. Disruptions in the virtualized environment are minor compared to the server farm. We met the requirement for 100% reliability, with every component protected with automated failover and replication. Scalability is no longer an issue since both Web and application servers scale out. All components tested individually greatly exceed performance today—a metric that will dramatically improve even more in the managed hosting environment with its enterprise-class storage capability. Costs have been reduced not only due to the commodity hardware in the hosting environment, but also due to its managed servers. Prior to virtualization, our client was forced to oversize the environment until load met resources—now they readily match requirements to solutions. Prior to virtualization, it would take our client one hour best case to add a physical server—now they do it in 10 minutes or less.

Fact: Our customized proof-of-concept demonstrated vast

improvements in performance, by moving an application

from an outdated server farm to a virtualized data center.