Challenge

A multi-national boutique investment bank with offices in the United States, Europe, and Asia was experiencing outages with mission-critical applications (such as Microsoft Exchange) and additional problems with its aging infrastructure.

Solution

Argentium Solutions developed a strategy for the firm’s existing technology staff that utilized technologies such as VMWare server virtualization, Microsoft Exchange 2010, and Dell EqualLogic iSCSI Storage Area Network arrays.

Benefit

The server virtualization initiative allowed the firm to consolidate many of its physical servers as virtual hosts running on newer, more powerful and efficient hardware.  This consolidation resulted in a reduction of datacenter real estate as well as power consumption—allowing the firm to save money on operational expenses, while also improving performance and uptime.  The architecture of this platform also sparked strategic conversations about the firm’s disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

Result

The new infrastructure has dramatically improved the uptime and performance of the Microsoft Exchange platform for the organization—with unplanned outages “a distant memory,” according to one of the technologists.  The virtualization foundation created by the engagement with Argentium Solutions has also considerably reduced the time for new application deployments for this organization; the time for new server deployments is measured in minutes, as opposed to weeks.