Reducing hardware and maintenance costs while increasing system usage were the keys to Commonwealth Financial Network’s recent server consolidation initiative.
The firm recently purchased two IBM 445 xSeries servers from Computer Resolutions Inc. to upgrade its data center.
“We purchased two IBM 445’s for one third of the price of upgrading our previous database servers,” says Kevin Freeman, manager of technology services at Commonwealth. “We’re getting more performance for our dollar.”
With multiple underutilized servers each running single applications, Computer Resolutions introduced Commonwealth to the SQL scale up opportunity and the benefits of VMware’s virtual infrastructure, which was also purchased. According to Freeman, “With the x445/VMware combination, I expect that I’ll be able to take a request for four servers and turn it into one with even higher performance.”
Commonwealth selected the two 445 xSeries servers to support its SQL server databases, which drive a variety of corporate applications for financial services, customer relationship management as well as their dynamic Web pages. “Our performance numbers have already shown dramatic enhancement in utilization,” says Freeman. “The nightly feeds of information into our database from our financial vendors have improved by 75%.”
“The price performance in today’s scaleable xSeries servers, like the X445, give Commonwealth the power and availability similar to mainframes,” says Computer Resolutions president, John Palmieri. “Commonwealth Financial will be able to scale this server up to 32 processors giving them almost infinite growth capabilities without replacing their server. Companies like Commonwealth are investing in capacity combined with our expertise that allows us to utilize technologies that tap into that available capacity.”
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