Standard Chartered PLC Chooses
PRIMERGY BladeFrame Powered by Egenera from Fujitsu Siemens
Computers for Core Retail-Banking Application
PRIMERGY BladeFrame's Unique Virtualization Capabilities
Create Market Differentiation and Customer Value for the
International Banking Group
Munich, June 06, 2006 —Fujitsu Siemens Computers, the leading European IT vendor,
today announced that Standard Chartered PLC, one of the
world’s most international banks with operations in more than
50 countries, has selected Fujitsu Siemens Computers’
PRIMERGY BladeFrame® powered by Egenera system as the platform
for its core retail-banking application globally. This application,
which runs IBM® WebSphere® and IBM DB2®, has the
bank’s highest classification for business criticality. Atos
Origin, Standard Chartered’s IT provider, will implement the
PRIMERGY BladeFrame systems and provide ongoing support from its
datacenter in Asia.
The PRIMERGY BladeFrame’s outstanding virtualization
technology, effective use of resources and customer-references
sites drove the decision and were key differentiators compared to
offerings from other providers. The Fujitsu Siemens Computers
solution met the bank’s short-term cost-cutting needs while
supporting its long-term strategic vision of flexible and
responsive datacenter infrastructure.
“Our IT vision is based on a pool of computing
resources that can be repurposed as needed based on business
requirements,” says Jan Verplancke, CIO, Group Head
Technology & Operations, Standard Chartered. “Working
with Atos Origin, we looked at mainframes, high-end RISC systems,
x86 white boxes and blades with the bank’s future in mind.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers was the only vendor with an integrated
solution for virtualization and the I/O fabric, and the only one
with a proven product. Their technology’s track record with
other world-class customers gave us the financial data we needed to
justify the investment and the confidence to deliver on our
strategy.”
He continues, “At the end of the day, the PRIMERGY
BladeFrame system was the lowest cost, lowest risk choice,
providing the most flexibility. It’s already helping us
improve time to market and IT responsiveness, and will ultimately
have a positive impact on revenues. Fujitsu Siemens Computers has
opened our eyes to a new way of thinking about the
datacenter.”
“The PRIMERGY BladeFrame system is the most advanced
offering for mixed workloads in our Dynamic Data Center solutions
portfolio, optimizing IT agility and increasing the responsiveness
of IT infrastructures to business needs,” says Dieter Herzog,
Executive Vice President, Enterprise Products, Fujitsu Siemens
Computers. “As one of our most visionary customers, Standard
Chartered quickly recognized both the technical and business
advantages of a virtualized environment. By replacing traditional
systems with the PRIMERGY BladeFrame’s next-generation
architecture, they have increased IT flexibility, slashed time to
market, improved application availability and dramatically lowered
costs—a powerful combination for competitive
advantage.”
“Standard Chartered leads the banking industry in
combining deep local knowledge with global capability to best serve
its customers,” says Bob Dutkowsky, Chairman, President and
CEO, Egenera. “By selecting the PRIMERGY BladeFrame powered
by Egenera, Jan and his team are contributing to this tradition,
enhancing the bank’s ability to respond quickly to in-country
needs while leveraging corporate IT assets worldwide.”
“The innovative solution we’re implementing for
Standard Chartered replaces the existing teller and back-office
systems with a single system, providing significant benefits to the
bank and its customers,” says Xavier Flinois, Member of the
Atos Origin Management Board with business responsibilities for the
UK, the Americas and Asia Pacific. “Standard Chartered is a
longstanding customer of Atos Origin; this project highlights our
global reach and ability to roll-out solutions across multiple
geographies.”
Standard Chartered chose the PRIMERGY BladeFrame system as
the platform for its retail-banking application—including
Internet, branch and phone-banking functions at 1,200 global
locations—based on several criteria:
Cost Savings
Standard Chartered considered deploying its retail-banking
application in each office worldwide, including countries in Asia,
the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the Americas. The sheer number
of CPUs required for an in-country approach resulted in
prohibitively high hardware and software-licensing costs. On the
other hand, standard servers—even clustered white
boxes—did not yield sufficient savings to compensate for the
high telecommunications costs of a centralized scheme.
“When you look at a virtualized environment, however,
you start to get significant benefits that make centralization the
right approach,” says Verplancke. “With the PRIMERGY
BladeFrame, we cut total cost of ownership in half compared to a
traditional x86 solution due to superior I/O and performance. We
expect that ratio to improve still further as we get more countries
up and running and can leverage the system’s repurposing
capabilities across time zones.”
This ability to repurpose servers will also lower costs by
increasing utilization. “We have RISC platforms running at
100 percent for three to four hours each evening and literally
doing nothing the rest of the day,” says Verplancke.
“Because of their legacy architecture, which binds a server
to a specific application, these machines cannot be repurposed for
other tasks. Alternatively, the PRIMERGY BladeFrame’s
virtualized architecture will enable us to do overnight batch
processing on blades that handle transactions during the
day.”
High Availability
While needing to lower capital and operational expenses,
Standard Chartered cannot afford to compromise reliability.
“High resiliency depends, in part, on how often a system
fails,” says Verplancke. “But we’re also looking
at our ability to recover from a failure. The Fujitsu Siemens
Computers platform enables us to recover very rapidly.”
The PRIMERGY BladeFrame also enables Standard Chartered to
make every application highly available at virtually no cost. The
system’s diskless architecture and virtualization
capabilities eliminate backup servers, redundant network and
storage connections and complex clustering software. The same N+1
approach can be applied at the system level to achieve disaster
recovery: Through mirroring, a single platform can back up
multiple, geographically dispersed servers.
Time to Market
With Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ virtualization and
management technologies, Atos Origin can bring a new country online
in nine days rather than 45 days as estimated for legacy
architecture. In other parts of the world, because the PRIMERGY
BladeFrame enables a centralized datacenter, the bank no longer
needs to establish IT facilities in-country, which can take up to
six months.
“Now, when we’re deciding whether to open a bank
in a given country, technology is not on the critical path,”
notes Verplancke.
Flexibility
Standard Chartered also needs to react quickly to changing
conditions in existing markets. With the PRIMERGY BladeFrame,
capacity can be reallocated on demand from a pool of processing
resources.
“The Fujitsu Siemens Computers system stands alone
among x86 platforms in its ability to separate the identity of a
server from its capacity,” explains Verplancke. “Now,
we can simply store application configurations on our SAN and map
them to any blades at any time.”
The PRIMERGY BladeFrame’s ability to run Red Hat®
Linux®, SUSE® Linux, Microsoft® Windows® and
Sun® Solaris™ simultaneously, on both AMD®- and
Intel®-based blades, enhances flexibility still further.
“Despite its name,” notes Verplancke, “the
PRIMERGY BladeFrame is not a blade server. It’s an
enterprise-class system, comparable to high-end RISC platforms,
that runs x86 processors and three operating systems. Before
Fujitsu Siemens Computers, we were unable to source hardware at the
high end of the stack that supported multiple environments.
Instead, we were locked into proprietary platforms to meet the
requirements of our mission-critical applications. The PRIMERGY
BladeFrame system delivers a truly unique combination of
resiliency, cost-effectiveness and flexibility ideally suited to
our vision for the future.”
- End -
About Fujitsu Siemens Computers
Fujitsu Siemens Computers is the leading European IT provider
with a strategic focus on next-generation Mobility and Dynamic Data
Center products, services and solutions. With a platform and
services portfolio of exceptional depth, our offering extends from
handhelds through desktops to enterprise-class IT infrastructure
solutions and services offerings. Fujitsu Siemens Computers has a
presence in all key markets across Europe, the Middle East and
Africa, with the services division extending coverage up to 170
countries worldwide. Leveraging the strengths, innovation and
global reach of our joint shareholders, Fujitsu Limited and Siemens
AG, we make sure we meet the needs of customers: large
corporations, small and medium enterprises and private users. To
meet international standards for corporate social responsibility,
Fujitsu Siemens Computers is a member of the United Nations Global
Compact.
For more information about Fujitsu Siemens Computers, please
visit:
www.fujitsu-siemens.com
About Egenera Inc.
Egenera is a global leader in delivering computing solutions
that simplify datacenter operations and infrastructure. The Egenera
BladeFrame product family simplifies the datacenter with an
innovative server architecture specifically designed to reduce
complexity and enable IT to respond rapidly to business
requirements. Market-leading enterprises around the world trust the
Egenera BladeFrame system to run their most important business
applications and achieve higher resource utilization, faster
application time to market and lower total cost of ownership.
Headquartered in Marlboro, Mass., Egenera has offices worldwide.
For more information visit
www.egenera.com
About Atos Origin
Atos Origin is an international information technology
services company. Its business is turning client vision into
results through the application of consulting, systems integration
and managed operations. The company’s annual revenues are EUR
5.5 billion and it employs over 47,000 people in 40 countries. Atos
Origin is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the
Olympic Games and has a client base of international blue-chip
companies across all sectors. Atos Origin is quoted on the Paris
Eurolist Market and trades as Atos Origin, Atos Euronext Market
Solutions, Atos Worldline and Atos Consulting. For more
information, please visit the company’s web site at
www.atosorigin.com
PR Contacts
Amy M.K. Flécher
Senior Director Communications
Tel.: +49 (0) 89 3222 4460
Mobile: +49 (0) 171 86 50 101
Fax: +49 (0) 89 3222 4466
amy.flecher@fujitsu-siemens.com
Ulrike G. Droeschel
Senior PR Manager
Tel.: + 49 (0) 89 3222 4454
Mobile:+ 49 (0) 172 980 1979
Fax: + 49 (0) 89 3222 329 4454
ulrike.droeschel@fujitsu-siemens.com
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