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Published on: May 01, 2009
Type of content: CASE STUDY
Format: Unknown
Length: 3 pages
Price: FREE

Overview:
The Halifax Bank of Scotland takes customer relationships very seriously; being the UK's largest mortgage and savings provider, it has a relationship with two out of every 5 UK households. Critical to providing exceptional customer service is a massive information technology infrastructure, designed to ensure that customers have 24/7 access to all information and banking services. Having over 67,000 users accessing it's network, downtime is not an option. Utilizing it's testing environment, a virtually identical, scaled down version of it's production environment, HBOS has been able to greatly lessen the chance of a problem working it's way into the production system.

Operating such a large SAN architecture becomes a huge undertaking, certainly not alleviated by continuous application changes, system patches, and hardware upgrades. "None of the tools that we had been using to monitor our SAN's performance could get us to the root of the problem, and some problems - in the early days - went unsolved, says Richard Briggs, Senior Technical Infrastructure Developer within Storage Management Services who was Technical Lead on the initial SAN implementation at HBOS which took place in 2000. Lacking a proper SAN performance monitoring solution, the team was left to utilize an ineffective 'process of elimination' method to attack problematic areas.

In this case study you will learn how HBOS leveraged Virtual Instruments' NetWisdom SAN I/O performance and analysis solution to proactively isolate and resolve SAN issues as well as design optimal SAN storage to easily scale over time.