European Bank Improves Uptime and Lowers Costs with StorMagic Virtual SAN
Bristol, United Kingdom (PRWEB) September 28, 2017 -- StorMagic, the company that makes virtual SANs simple for edge computing, today announced that Mediterranean Bank has deployed SvSAN to significantly lower their costs of computing while improving resiliency and performance of critical applications.
Mediterranean Bank was founded in 2004 in Malta, and as well as providing banking and financial services to the local population, it offers online savings, investment and wealth management under the MeDirect brand in Belgium. The company employs more than 250 people, with locations across Malta, as well as remote sites in London and Brussels.
Installing StorMagic SvSAN delivered a range of benefits to Mediterranean Bank. Their requirement for physical storage was eliminated along with the additional expenditure on cooling, power consumption and maintenance. By reducing their reliance on physical hardware and moving to virtual SANs, the bank modernized their architecture and enjoyed much improved resiliency. They avoided the purchase and installation of physical SANs which would have been significantly more expensive and more complex than virtualization, particularly at the remote sites in Belgium and the UK.
The bank already had physical shared storage using six year old servers andthese were approaching their end of life. The infrastructure performed a variety of roles depending on the location, including vital security components such as the operation of the main office’s front gate and the handling of highly sensitive data such as new customer applications. The London and Belgian sites had critical business virtual machines running on multiple old servers with local storage and wanted to consolidate, while at the same time improving performance and resiliency. In Malta, the Business Intelligence team had a special requirement to implement a new solution, consisting of web, apps, and network storage for the Qlickview operations that had to be available even in disaster recovery scenarios. For all three sites, a modern, lightweight and flexible solution was needed to provide the high availability that was vital to the bank’s operations.
Through research of the options available, Julian Vella, Mediterranean Bank’s Senior Engineer - IT Systems, came across SvSAN. Their need for a low cost solution that minimized hardware footprint made SvSAN an ideal fit and ruled out a number of other virtualized options where additional hardware would have been required. Julian ruled out a physical SAN for the London and Brussels remote sites simply because of the geographical distance and the need to minimize footprint and maintenance. StorMagic SvSAN was selected because it met all of the key requirements: high availability, small footprint and low cost.
Because SvSAN is software-defined and enables high availability between two servers, the uptime requirement was met, and operational costs were lowered significantly as well. In Malta, the bank has implemented a stretch cluster using SvSAN, allowing synchronous mirroring between two physical sites, providing additional resiliency and protection from local site outages. With this solution, all virtual machines in the cluster are always synchronized, and Mediterranean Bank has the ability to move the VMs between sites without any disruption.
“StorMagic SvSAN helps our branches achieve the availability required to operate in the extremely secure, fast-paced world of banking. Their virtual SAN software is exactly what we needed to deliver the uptime and simplicity of management - while keeping to a very tight budget.” Julian Vella, Senior Engineer - IT Systems, Mediterranean Bank
About StorMagic
StorMagic makes virtual SANs simple for edge computing. Our product, SvSAN, is designed specifically for small and large enterprises with one to thousands of locations that require highly available compute and storage at the lowest possible cost. Underpinned by simplicity, cost-effectiveness and flexibility, StorMagic SvSAN removes the need for a physical SAN in some of the world’s most demanding environments by converting the disk, flash and memory of two servers into a virtual SAN.
Bruce Kornfeld, StorMagic, http://www.stormagic.com, +1 5128277114, [email protected]
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