Computershare
Logicalis helps Computershare create a disaster-tolerant environment for share registration processes
Company Profile
Computershare was established in Melbourne in 1978. In 1997, it expanded its registry business, entering the rest of Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It also moved into the development of exchange and broker systems, significantly extending its products and services for the international securities industry.
Computershare is a leading financial services and technology provider for the global securities industry. It is the largest and only global share registry/transfer agent, managing more than 68 million shareholder accounts in 14 countries, including 28 million in the UK. In 2003, the company handled 16.5 million CREST transactions with a total value of £250 billion a day.
Customer's Business Issues
Computershare needed to respond to growing pressure of storage growth. This fuelled the demand for further improvements in disaster tolerance, performance and minimising downtime.
Computershare delivers high-performance, mission critical and disaster tolerant applications to the financial industry and therefore needs to continually evolve its technology to continue to meet the evolving needs of its clients. Computershare manages more than 60 million shareholder accounts for over 7,000 corporations around the world; therefore its main challenge is for its data to be fast, precise and accessible.
Gary Paramore, UK technical infrastructure manager, Computershare, explains: “We were faced with having multiple disparate storage subsystems to manage and a SAN infrastructure no longer capable of maintaining our multiplatform data storage or transfer needs.”
As part of Computershare’s portfolio, it manages customers’ shares; therefore transactions must be changed instantly. At the close of business, Computershare must reconcile all share transactions with stock exchange settlement systems (such as CREST in the UK, DTC in NA, STRATE in South Africa and CHESS in Australia). Failure to achieve this requirement would result in the inability of that company to trade the following day, along with a loss of business and credibility to Computershare.
With the high level of transactions, the demands on the storage infrastructure are vast “not just in terms of raw capacity, but performance also,” says Paramore. As a result, the storage technology is updated regularly to maintain these high standards.
Computershare upgraded to a 1 GB SAN environment three years ago. However, continued growth of the business and the variety of financial services offered across multiple platforms meant they were running out of storage space and the capacity to replicate this data between sites effectively. “We were forced with a growth in the number of servers, increasing demands for storage capacity, connectivity and throughput and so needed to leverage off the benefits of newer end-to-end 2 GB technology,” says Paramore.
“Logicalis demonstrated an ability to introduce the right technical resource both from Logicalis and the relevant vendor at the right stages within the project from initial discussions through to post-implementation,” says Paramore. “Logicalis’ vendor relationships offered us a total solution that would meet our requirements and deliver an excellent ROI.”
The Logicalis Solution
Logicalis, working with Computershare, implemented a more robust, disaster-tolerant storage environment across multiple sites. This comprised of HP EVA5000 hardware, Cisco Director SAN Switches and LTO2 Tape technologies.
The HP EVA5000 was chosen for its high performance, high capacity and high availability. The EVA5000 is designed for when there is a critical need for improved storage utilisation and scalability, whilst meeting application-specific demands for consistently high transaction I/O and MB data rate performance, seamless capacity expansion, data replication and simplified storage management.
Computershare took the decision to move from HP EMA16000 and ESA12000 to EVA5000 for many reasons. “The EVA and its storage virtualisation technologies improve our capacity footprint, performance and disaster recovery capabilities, particularly relevant to our Windows environments. It also reduces our storage administration overheads and maintenance costs,” explains Paramore.
Computershare has a robust multi site OpenVMS disaster recovery position, but required improvements to its Windows disaster recovery arrangement. The EVA gives Computershare sustained high-speed synchronous data replication between sites with no host processing overheads and makes storage and failover management easier through centralisation.
Cisco MDS9509 Director SAN Switches were chosen as they offered an advanced technology and a similar management interface to existing Cisco network equipment that Computershare already has. “The commands, utilities, etc. are very similar, which simply reduces learning curves and makes them easier for us to work with,” says Paramore.
Why Logicalis?
Computershare decided to refresh its existing tape technology away from DLT to LTO2. “This has dramatically improved tape operations across both OpenVMS and Windows platforms, providing a 2-3 fold performance gain for backup and restore functions, whilst dramatically reducing the number of tapes required,” Paramore states. “Overall Logicalis, Cisco and HP have worked exceptionally well with us to ensure compatibility and stability of technologies during a key time of change with our refresh programmes.”
