Financial

International Investment Bank

Conducted an I/O Profiling exercise to determine the Storage Area Network (SAN) capacity requirements of the largest (at the time) implementation in the world covering the following platforms; SUN, Dec and IBM hosts, IBM ESS, EMC Symmetrix and Compaq Storage Works storage servers. We also needed to provide performance guidance throughout stress and functional testing. We defined and used I/O Profiling metrics for SAN capacity planning following which we also developed the service level metrics to be used by a managed storage service offering.

Large UK Bank

Provided performance-benchmarking guidance during stress and functional testing of a high profile internet banking application running on SUN, Compaq, IBM and Tandem platforms. We defined and developed the performance reporting required for end-to-end response time measurements of the new e-banking application.

European subsidiary of a Large UK Bank

Lead a team of consultants covering performance management and storage management disciplines to assess the efficiency of their mainframe systems serving two of their European operations. The study produced a large number of optimisation recommendations that were presented both at a technical level and a management level, both within the UK and at the banks European offices. The results were favourably received with a very high customer satisfaction rating being achieved.

Large UK Bank

Lead team of consultants performing the capacity planning function for a new E-commerce Internet Banking application. The platforms covered including NT, Unix, Mainframe, Tandem and Network. The result of the project was the creation of an initial capacity plan which identified significant bottlenecks that needed to be addressed before the service could be launched and the development of a set of reports that monitored the end to end performance of the new application.

Large UK Bank

Performed an assessment of the Performance and Capacity Management processes as applied to the mainframe Development of the bank. The results of the assessment showed that by making the recommended process and system changes it would be possible to make significant productivity savings worth in the order of £6M per year to the Bank.

Large UK Bank

Performed a Capacity Review of a new application. The study encompassed both the IBM Mainframe and the TCP/IP network and confirmed that the planned roll-out could take place without the need for additional hardware investment.

Large UK Bank

Reviewed the Capacity requirements of the bank to take them through an 18 month period which would cater for substantial growth including the overhead of implementing a full datasharing parallel sysplex for a large CICS/DB2 application.. The project considered 2 datacenters and made allowances for various disaster recovery scenarios.

Large International Bank

Provided architectural guidance with regards to reducing their total cost of ownership (TCO) via server and storage consolidation on SUN, Compaq, IBM AS/400 and IBM Netfinity platforms. We developed plans that would allow them to implement Server Consolidation (SCON) and Storage Area Networks (SAN).

Large American Bank

Performed a capacity planning healthcheck to analyse and identify any shortfalls in system availability that contribute to missed service levels on their S/390, MVS, Adabas and IBM DB2 systems. We analysed IT systems for timeliness of completion, ability to take on increased workload and or adequate capacity to facilitate recovery. This lead on to the development a simulation model used to predict adherence to service levels by using business volumes as input to the model. This resulted in the elimination of unnecessary batch jobs and recovering 30 minutes of the overnight batch window