CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Reducing Risk in Financial Services Information Access
AT A GLANCE
Commerx Delivers a Failure-Proof SAN for
Industrial Alliance Securities
Organization
Business Situation
Industrial Alliance Securities, Inc. offers
brokerage services throughout Canada
and the United States. The company
provides financial products including
bank acceptances, guaranteed
investment certificates, mutual funds,
stocks, treasury bills, fixed-income
securities, and options.
Industrial Alliance Securities (IAS) started its business in 2002. Since then it has
expanded its retail network throughout Canada, from Nova Scotia to Vancouver.
Mainly concentrated in Quebec and Ontario, IAS now provides financial services to
its clients through a network of approximately 200 financial advisors. That growth
created a need for more reliable IT systems to support service delivery.
The Challenge
Provide data centre redundancy and
failover to maximize business continuity,
avoid business interruption, and
facilitate technology maintenance and
upgrades.
The Commerx Solution
Deploy HP Lefthand SAN storage
solutions in each data centre using
VMware virtualization software and
supporting 40 virtual machines.
The Result
Greater reliability and availability, as
proven by successfully riding out a
regional power failure without
interrupting operations.
IAS Information Technology Director, Vlad Hanganu, oversees the company’s two
data centres, located 35 km apart in the Montreal region. “We had redundancy in
our data centres,” he recalled, “but our disaster recovery plan was not as solid as it
could have been. We realized that virtualizing the data centres would allow us to
move virtual machines from one location to the other in the event of trouble, and
let us perform maintenance on one data centre, while the other remained up and
running. That would help us strengthen the reliability of the system and make it less
prone to outages.”
The Solution
Hanganu called Commerx Computer Systems for help making IAS’s two data
centres work together. Commerx, “The Infrastructure Expert,” is based in
Mississauga, Ontario, and dedicated to providing expertise that helps customers
put the right pieces together to achieve success in any IT project. Among its areas
of specialization, Commerx provides extensive service in the areas of virtualization,
storage, and business continuity – each of which would be key to unifying IAS’s two
IT locations.
Hanganu said his selection was made easier still by the reputation of Commerx
Chief Technical Architect, Mihai Lazar. “I’ve known Mihai for a long time and I was
familiar with his experience with HP,” he said, “so I would trust Mihai for a technical
solution any time.”
Lazar and the Commerx team proposed a virtualization solution using VMware
software running on HP servers and a new HP Lefthand networking solution. “I
explained the topography and layout of our network, and in less than a week,
Mihai had a proposal ready,” Hanganu said.
Featuring a multi-tiered HP Lefthand P4500 Multi-Site SAN Solution with two nodes on
each site, the proposal called for splitting storage evenly between the two data
centres. The plan also included two VMware ESX Hosts/Servers on each site, running
VMware 4.1 software supporting a total of nearly 40 different virtual machines,
divided between production operations, testing and development.
The production machines would be utilized to support applications including
accounting, compliance, commission calculations, Blackberry and Microsoft
Exchange servers, and access to more than two million documents stored online
and served to investment advisors. Virtualization allows these services to run in either
data centre, and even switch seamlessly between them whenever necessary.
“After the experience we’ve had, I’m
certain we would come back and use
Commerx for a future project.”
- Vlad Hanganu, Industrial Alliance Securities, Inc. IT Director
The Results
From start to finish, Hanganu said, the entire project took less than
two months. “Half of the environment was set up by Mihai and
myself, and I was able to do the other half myself based on that
experience and transfer of knowledge from Mihai,” he said. “This
translated into an economical solution for us because we did not
have to pay consultants to perform half of the work.”
The project was performed at just the right moment to help
facilitate IAS’s growth. “Now that we’re virtual, we have plenty
of expansion space in our cabinets, and the power consumption
dropped by 40%,” Hanganu reported. “The environment is way
easier to monitor and the backups are faster with the Veeam
solutions suggested by Commerx.”
Virtualizing systems also proved surprisingly easy. “We started
virtualizing one machine after another, just virtualizing and
making sure machines became virtual correctly,” Hanganu said.
“And because Commerx analyzed the project before we started
and did all the work according to the rules of system
administration, it all went according to plan. I wish all my projects
were like this.”
With the new system in place, IAS’s IT operations are much more
reliable and resistant to disruption. Because the storage area
network resides virtually in two locations simultaneously, it can
ride through an outage in one data centre with no interruptions
to users and applications.
Hanganu can also move virtual machines from one data centre
to the other with complete transparency, clearing the way for
maintenance or upgrades whenever they are needed. The
system also allows IAS to establish disaster recovery locations
virtually anywhere they choose. “There’s no geographical
boundaries for the system,” Hanganu said. “We can establish a
DR site in Toronto or elsewhere in the time it takes to move servers
and set up the new location.”
The virtualized system’s value has already been proven in a realworld incident. When a localized power system failure brought
down one of the two data centres, the storage area network
automatically switched over to the other location and continued
operations.
“I sleep well because I know the solution works,” Hanganu
observed. “Now I know for sure that if something happens, our
systems will remain available. Very few companies can say they
have a solution like that in place.”
The Partnership
With the new, virtualization-based SAN in service at IAS’s two
data centres, Hanganu has begun planning for additional
enhancements. Although the two data centres are currently
running at approximately 50 percent loads – a satisfactory figure
for assuring failover capacity – the company’s continuing growth
suggests a need for more servers and storage in the future. He
also anticipates a transition for VMware Version 5 in the coming
year.
No matter what need arises next, Hanganu said he’s sure to call
Commerx for IT support and services. “This is one of the biggest
projects we’ve been involved in, and it has been the fastest and
smoothest ever,” he said. “After the experience we’ve had, I’m
certain we would come back and use Commerx for a future
project.”
ABOUT COMMERX
Commerx Computer Systems, Inc. was founded in 1984 to
service the HP computing base with equipment and
maintenance services. Today, Commerx designs and develops
virtualization solutions for large, medium and small enterprise
clients plus a wide variety of service providers. Our solutions
include infrastructure Design and Implementation, Application
Delivery and Business Continuity Planning, Backup and Recover,
and Information Security.
Our staff represents the finest computing experts available. Our
experience in architecture and in leading the implementation
of some of the most creative and innovative solutions available
is unparalleled. These solutions include complex network design,
process improvement, data centre design, proactive
infrastructure monitoring and support, cloud readiness and
managed services.
As emerging technologies appear, our customers depend upon
us to evaluate and recommend those solutions that are most
beneficial to their business and help them gain a competitive
advantage, while improving service levels to their own
customers. During the past 29 years, Commerx Computer
Systems has done business with over 1000 customers across
Canada and the United States, including customers from the
traditional SMB marketplace, as well as from the Fortune 100.
Find out how Commerx can put this same experience and depth of
resources to work for you: visit www.commerx.ca or call 905.542.9400
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