Teachers Credit Union was founded in 1966 when a small team of like-minded individuals wanted to improve the finance options available to teachers and their families. Initially known as the Hornsby Teachers Association Credit Union, the organisation grew swiftly, becoming the NSW Teachers Association Credit Union and rapidly adding and developing new services. Forty-five years later, the original membership of 29 has expanded to more than 155,000 and the organisation now has 400 employees and offices in Western Australia, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.

In 2010, the credit union dropped the ‘NSW’ and became Teachers Credit Union to reflect its national status. It offers transaction and savings accounts, loans, credit cards, insurance, wealth management, financial planning and banking products tailored for customers buying a car, going on holiday, or studying.

CHALLENGES

From initial deposits totalling AUD$644, Teachers Credit Union has grown its assets to reach more than AUD$3 billion. For the past decade, the credit union has grown at a rate of 15 per cent per annum.

“That year-on-year growth is significant and we have to manage that,” said Colin Thomas, Chief Information Officer, Teachers Credit Union. “As a business, we need to meet the market expectation that we will provide new products and services, while internally we need to make better use of data more often. Plus, we are facing more stringent regulations surrounding compliance and data retention and face growing business demand for improved reporting and business intelligence systems.”

Teachers Credit Union has five branches and two offices that perform back-end functions. The company’s primary data centre is housed in its head office in Sydney, while a secondary, identical data centre is housed in a Sydney branch.

This second site acts as the company’s disaster recovery centre and houses similar infrastructure to the production facility. The production infrastructure supports Teachers Credit Union’s critical business applications, such as its core banking system, and sensitive information such as customer details.

To store and manage this information, Teachers Credit Union had been using Oracle Sun storage, while tape was used for backup and archiving. However, having been deployed in

2006, the infrastructure was reaching end of life. It no longer provided the credit union with peace of mind that its data was being efficiently stored or backed up.

“The main driving force for change was that we were simply running out of space,” said Thomas. “Our current growth, coupled with the new products and services, meant we no longer had the storage and backup facilities we needed.”

Implementing a New Data Storage System

Faced with insufficient storage and tape capacity, unreliable tape libraries and limited speed and scalability, Teachers Credit Union embarked on a project to replace its entire data storage infrastructure and improve its disaster recovery capabilities. The organisation undertook extensive research to ensure it chose a product which provided the greatest capacity and scalability.

David Goska, IT Server Administrator, Teachers Credit Union, carried out a five-year projection on the storage required to sustain the predicted rate of business growth, and assessed extra requirements that had not previously been considered. He calculated the credit union would need 300TB in total – 150TB at each of its production and disaster recovery sites.

The organisation realised that as well as increased storage capacity, it needed deduplication and thin provisioning capabilities. As Oracle Sun storage did not have thin provisioning technology, extending the existing storage system was not an option. Teachers Credit Union then engaged EMC partner United Business Solutions to help it assess data storage and information management providers.

EMC SOLUTION

In February 2010, Teachers Credit Union decided to deploy a new infrastructure in its production data centre based on EMC technologies, with a duplicate version running at its secondary site.

“Data Domain has allowed us reduce 132.4TB of raw data down to 8.1TB of actual data and given us faster, simpler and more reliable backup capabilities. We now have peace of mind our critical business data is protected and we do not experience unnecessary outages.”

DAVID GOSKA IT SERVER ADMINISTRATOR, TEACHERS CREDIT UNION

This infrastructure comprises an EMC Data Domain DD660 deduplication storage system, an EMC RecoverPoint data protection and remote replication device, an EMC Celerra NS-120 network-attached storage device and an EMC CLARiiON CX4-120 networked storage system with EMC Connectrix-branded Brocade switches.

Additionally, the organisation is planning on moving its data centre to a colocation facility, so needed a storage system with a compressed footprint. The Data Domain storage system offers a considerably smaller physical footprint and reduced rack space requirements, which would enable the company to operate within the power and environmental constraints of a co-location data centre.

Teachers Credit Union also deployed EMC RecoverPoint to take advantage of its continuous replication with the ability to recover to any point in time, rather than back to a periodically updated ‘snapshot’ of the IT environment.

Reduced Data Storage

Each Data Domain DD660 has 13.2TB of raw data storage capacity, giving Teachers Credit Union 26.4TB of available raw capacity. “The 16.3 times compression factor – equating to a 93.9 per cent reduction in data due to deduplication and compression – means we effectively have capacity of about 200TB on each Data Domain device,” said Thomas. “Without deduplication, we would have to purchase approximately 400TB of storage rather than 26TB.”

The organisation has reduced 132.4TB of raw data to 8.1TB of deduplicated data across both devices. “These numbers are fantastic,” said Thomas. “It means we’re barely scratching the surface of storage availability. We’ve still got plenty of capacity available on each device and I’ve already got three or four months worth of backups retained from across the whole organisation.” Teachers Credit Union has the ability to retain about 140TB more in backup data at each site, or 280TB across both sites.

The deduplication functionality means daily backups only comprise 400GB of data. This enables the organisation to complete backups faster and has made the overall management of backups easier by removing the need for tape.

“Our previous tape library was unreliable,” said Goska. “We had 80 tapes but we would consistently have to buy new ones and swap them round so we could shelve old ones until their data had expired and we could recycle them.”

“Sometimes we would run out of free tapes completely,” added Thomas. “That still gives me the shivers. Now it’s refreshing to be able to go home at night and have confidence in the system, knowing the backups are going to work.”

“We can now transfer backups to a second location without moving tapes because the Data Domain replication process is so simple,” said Goska. “Every 15 minutes the system checks for changes and then it fully replicates every hour.”

The Data Domain replication process works in both directions, so all the information in one data centre is replicated to the other. This enables the reliable, seamless backup of critical processes and also protects data during the development and testing of new products.

With EMC RecoverPoint providing continuous replication and enabling point in time recovery, Teachers Credit Union now has greater flexibility.

“Our legacy solution was based on snapshot replication, which meant the infrastructure supporting our core banking system had been a bit rigid,” said Thomas. “Having the flexibility to pick a point in time provides us with a healthy recovery point. It gives our IT team extra confidence when they recover a database in a mirror situation, or if a disaster occurs that requires a failover or recovery.”

No More Outages

Teachers Credit Union’s legacy storage system would often experience outages, especially during product upgrade processes, which could send its business-critical core banking system offline. Since deploying the new EMC-based infrastructure, the credit union has had no system outages, allowing it to provide customers with highly available services.

“One of the big things for us was high availability, which included no outages for scheduled maintenance,” said Goska. “Business dynamics are changing and we can’t continue to interrupt our customer service. But we have just completed our first upgrade using the EMC storage and it was seamless.”

The credit union has also implemented VMware vSphere as a virtualisation platform for its virtual servers. Despite expecting to experience server outages during this period, the system stayed online for the entire migration of around 100 servers.

“The EMC solution has lifted our game dramatically,” Thomas said. “Our current capabilities with Data Domain are incomparable to the previous technology. Five years ago I couldn’t have imagined what we can do now. The things EMC have allowed us to do are just fantastic.”

The Challenge

Most of Wellington City Council’s IT system runs in a modern Windows environment, but rate payments, an important customer-facing service, were reliant on 20 year-old VAX and Alpha systems, which were close to the end of their useful lives. The Council’s IT department did not wish to incur the high cost of rewriting the software applications running on the original VAX and Alpha systems in order to transfer these functions, as well as the large amount of stored data that related to them to a new Windows environment, since all Council IT budgets were under pressure as a result of the current economic downturn. The challenge was to find a low-cost, yet highly efficient solution that would upgrade the aging legacy hardware, while adding a new level of back-up security in order to protect sensitive ratepayer data and financial records, including linking the functionality of the legacy system to a new HP EVA SAN and enabling data replication on a modern Disaster Recovery Site.

The Solution

After evaluating all available options, Wellington City Council System Architect Rob Buxton
selected Stromasys’ CHARON-AXP and CHARON-VAX cross-platform virtualization software,
supplied by United Business Solutions Professional Services (UBS) as the preferred solution.
Their decision was based on the fact that CHARON software is the only solution capable of
creating an exact replication of the legacy VAX and AXP systems. Another important reason
for choosing UBS was that Rod Buxton had the on-staff expertise and capacity to install the
CHARON-AXP and CHARON-VAX software and manage the migration in-house, providing a
significant cost savings.

Geoff Lang of UBS explains that while most CHARON-VAX and CHARON-AXP software is
supplied and installed by UBS in partnership with the end user’s external IT Consultant
or Supplier, there are end users who have the expertise to accomplish the migration in
house and UBS is more than happy to work with them.

“Fortunately,” says Geoff, who successfully completed more than 120 CHARON
migrations in Australia and New Zealand, “installation is relatively straightforward and
trouble-free and any minor compatibility problems with the legacy system that may arise
can usually be dealt with very quickly and easily.”

One important factor influencing Buxton’s decision to install the CHARON systems
in-house was the fact that there was a reasonable time frame available to complete
the project. This enabled Wellington Municipal Council to schedule staff to work on
the installation and testing of the software over several weeks without creating an
unnecessary strain on the IT Department’s normal operations. Once everything was in
place, the actual migration was very quick and took place over only three hours on a
Sunday.

“The important thing for us,” says Rob Buxton, “is that we were able to draw on as
much help and advice from UBS as necessary, without incurring the costs of on-site
service. They were always available at the end of the phone, and this was all the help
we needed.”

The Results

Wellington City Council’s legacy software application has been successfully transferred
to function in a modern Windows environment, and is now running on a new HP server
that delivers measurable savings in rack space, energy consumption, cooling costs, and
significantly reduced CO2 emissions.

The new system successfully emulates the legacy system without any changes to the
application, user interfaces, data, and command files and there has been a problem-free
transition to the new system by the Council’s customer-facing and data entry personnel.
The system has also achieved a new level of backup security through an effective linkage
to a modern HP EVA SAN that enables data replication on a modern Disaster Recovery
Site to protect confidential ratepayer data and essential financial records.

About Stromasys

Stromasys SA is a privately held company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, serving
thousands of users in more than 50 countries. Stromasys develops and markets Cross-
Platform Virtualization solutions that allow owners of PDP, VAX, and Alpha computers
to continue to run their business-critical applications unchanged on modern, industrystandard
computer systems.

Stromasys SA was established in 1998 as part of a management buyout of DEC’s
(Digital Equipment Corporation) European Migration and Porting centre following the
HP/Compaq merger. The vast experience gained from years of large-scale migration
and porting projects, System-level VMS engineering projects, and development of Binary
translators eventually led to the development of the CHARON-VAX and CHARON-AXP
products. For more information, please visit www.stromasys.com.

The Challenge

Tomago Aluminium had been running one of their key production systems on an aging DEC Alphaserver for the past eight years. While the proven software running on this OpenVMSbased system was a good functional fit, the age and reliability of the platform was a significant cause for concern. For Tomago, the challenge was to find a means of upgrading and modernizing their computer hardware, while avoiding the significant costs associated with migrating to a new hardware platform and rewriting their applications and programs. An emulator package, which would theoretically enable the existing software to be housed on a modern Windows system, was an obvious alternative, but the risk was that the emulator software would not be capable of creating an exact replication of the legacy AXP system, which was critical for the ongoing productivity of the entire plant. An exact fit was imperative.

The Solution

Tomago’s IT supplier, Fujitsu, had evaluated all available emulator software packages and
were confident in recommending the Stomasys CHARON-AXP cross-platform virtualization
software as the best practice solution to meet the aluminium producer’s needs. This
decision was based on the CHARON software’s proven ability to replicate the legacy AXP
system exactly, and factored in the active involvement of UBS in the migration process, since
they had already successfully completed over 120 AXP migrations. Tomago then requested
reference sites from UBS and contacted existing CHARON users in Australia to confirm their
positive experiences with the system.

Because the software programs running on the legacy system were mission-critical,
the Tomago Project Team made risk minimization a priority during the implementation
process. Accordingly, they decided that the live migration would not go ahead until the
ability of the CHARON system to replicate the AXP functionality had been proven, and
these trials were undertaken with active support of both Fujitsu and UBS. The initial
migration took place in a development situation in order to validate that everything that
was running on the legacy system was also running on the emulator system. Because
of this diligent preparation, the live migration was absolutely painless and took place in
less than four hours.

The Results

The migration from the aging AlphaServer to the CHARON-AXP software was completely
successful, and has delivered an OpenVMS application that is fully functioning and
performs identically to the legacy system, without compromising access to Windows,
Oracle, or the connection to essential LAT devices used to capture data in the
manufacturing process.
As Tomago Project Manager Lesleyanne Clifton points out, the CHARON-AXP emulation
of the legacy software was so perfect, and the migration so painless that the majority of
end users were not consciously aware it had taken place, even though all internal users
were officially notified of the changeover.
The overall efficiency of the system has been greatly enhanced, since backup has been
converted to a virtual tape application built into the CHARON system, and as a result,
nightly backup that used to take 5 hours now takes 30 minutes. The new IBM X Series
Server now running the CHARON software occupies a fraction of the rack space required
by the legacy system and reduces operating costs, since it consumes significantly less
power and emits less heat, a factor in reducing CO2 emissions.
The new system has a useful life of at least 10 years and can be expanded at any time
during or after this period should extra system capacity be required in the future.

About Stromasys

Stromasys SA is a privately held company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, serving
thousands of users in more than 50 countries. Stromasys develops and markets Cross-
Platform Virtualization solutions that allow owners of PDP, VAX, and Alpha computers
to continue to run their business-critical applications unchanged on modern, industrystandard
computer systems.
Stromasys SA was established in 1998 as part of a management buyout of DEC’s
(Digital Equipment Corporation) European Migration and Porting centre following the
HP/Compaq merger. The vast experience gained from years of large-scale migration
and porting projects, System-level VMS engineering projects, and development of Binary
translators eventually led to the development of the CHARON-VAX and CHARON-AXP
products. For more information, please visit www.stromasys.com.

The Challenge –

All of Trend Windows & Doors critical operating systems – including product design, manufacturing, and sales, were reliant on an aging DEC VAX 7840 VMS server released in the mid 1970s. It had reached capacity, and since the cost of rewriting all the company’s operational systems would have run into millions of dollars, Trend was considering the purchase and commissioning of a second aging VAX system in order to increase capacity, while retaining their current software applications. While this would have been a less costly solution, there were concerns that a second system might incur unforseen teething problems or fail to deliver the promised improvement in processing capacity, both negative outcomes that could have compromised the company’s manufacturing or sales operations. There was also concern about the large footprint of an additional VAX system and the cost of an enlarged operating environment at Trend’s Girraween headquarters in Sydney. Trend also felt the need for a modern storage solution that would not have been compatible with the old VAX legacy system.

The Opportunity

Trend’s long-time IT supplier, Oriel Technologies, approached UBS Solutions to evaluate
CHARON-VAX as a virtual VAX environment that would enable all current VAX applications
to run unchanged on a modern server, while also enabling much higher processing speeds
and ensuring capacity for future expansion. The challenge was to deliver a legacy system
migration project to move the Trend applications to another platform without changing user
interaction, code in the application, access to Rdb on Windows, and a number of LAT
connected devices used within the manufacturing process. Unlike other virtual VAX systems
available, CHARON-VAX is the only solution capable of creating an exact replication of
the current VAX system, rather than attempting to imitate the VAX applications on other
platforms.

The Discovery

Because of the strong Oriel Technologies relationship with HP, HP agreed to provide the
facilities of their testing room for a month in order to test the operation of Trend’s current VAX
software through the CHARON overlay, which was installed on a new HP server. Thanks to
this exhaustive testing, the decision to install CHARON-VAX was a low-risk one. As Trend IT
Manager Ray Schroder commented, “the CHARON-VAX product was proved to be all it had
claimed to be and it has been working for us very, very well more than three years now.”

The Implementation

Geoff Lang of UBS, who has facilitated more than 120 CHARON-VAX migrations in
Australia, has never yet encountered any major problem during this process. He recalls
that management of the CHARON-VAX implementation project was accomplished by Oriel
with support from UBS over a single weekend with minimal downtime. Minor hardware
connectivity issues that arose due to the aging hardware were dealt with easily and the
project was completed on time and within budget with minimal impact to the business and
the end users. The migration to a new AMD based HP Proliant DL385 server also facilitated
the addition of storage and other modern functions which were incompatible with the old
VAX hardware.

The Results

Trend IT Manager Ray Schroder concurs that the migration of the Trend Windows legacy
software to the new high speed operating environment has proved to be very successful. The
result is a fully functioning, identically performing OpenVMS application on a segmented
network and Trend Windows now use their Virtual VAX/VMS Server with their critical
business application every day. The current CHARON-VAX system is expected to remain
in place for another 10 years and if a performance boost is required in the future, the
CHARON software can simply be upgraded with a few minutes outage. The system also
streamlines the nightly backup operation, now accomplished in minutes instead of the hours
taken by the legacy system.
As an added bonus, the transfer of the operating software from the aging VAX server to the
new HP server also resulted in a major reduction in the cost of the operating environment,
which was physically moved from the in-house facility at Girraween to a hosted space within
Telstra’s Sydney hosting facility. This not only ensures greater operating security for Trend, but
also frees up a significant amount of overhead in Trend’s corporate headquarters in terms of
rent, power, and carbon footprint.

About Stromasys

Stromasys SA is a privately held company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, serving
thousands of users in more than 50 countries. Stromasys develops and markets Cross-Platform
Virtualization solutions that allow owners of PDP, VAX, and Alpha computers to continue to run
their mission-critical applications – unchanged on new, industry standard computer systems.
Stromasys SA was established in 1998 as part of a management buyout of DEC’s (Digital
Equipment Corporation) European Migration and Porting centre following the HP/Compaq
merger. The vast experience gained from years of large-scale migration and porting projects,
System-level VMS engineering projects and development of Binary translators eventually led
to the development of the CHARON-VAX and CHARON-AXP products. For more information,
please visit www.stromasys.com.

In a country of weather extremes it’s no wonder that record-breaking numbers of Australian households have installed air conditioners in the past decade. It’s a trend that surveys suggest will only continue in the decade ahead. For air conditioning vendors the surge in demand is driving revenue and company growth. As with any industry however, successfully capitalising on this boom requires tight business management, efficient processes and a solid underlying infrastructure. So what does a company do when its 30-year old telephone system is suddenly being asked to deal with a rapidly growing number of calls?

For Fujitsu General (Aust.) Pty Limited, one of Australia’s leading providers of air conditioning units, the solution was to replace its ageing technology with a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system and to install a new call centre application that would smooth the flow of incoming communications and enhance customer service.

An office move means opportunity

It was in late 2008 when planning for an upcoming head office move that Fujitsu General’s management realised it had the ideal opportunity to replace its decades-old telephone system. After considering the options the company decided to move to a VoIP system due to its potential call cost savings, greater configuration flexibility and ability to almost endlessly expand to match business growth.

Given the VoIP system would need to manage the national call centre and would be relied on for communications in Fujitsu General offices Australia-wide, the company decided to seek a technology partner to provide the necessary expertise and guidance for this critical project. Four IT services companies were approached and asked for their recommendations and quotations. According to Matthew Barnes, IT Manager, Fujitsu General, “We were really seeking advice on what we could and couldn’t do with VoIP. “

One of the organisations approached was United Business Solutions (UBS), an IT services and solutions company focused on the corporate and government enterprise market. UBS recommended a solution comprising the VoIP infrastructure and an Interactive Intelligence contact centre management software platform.

“UBS were the last people to come in and present. They were very easy to get along with. The biggest appeal with their presentation was the fact that they included a software-driven phone system. The software would live on a Windows-based server with connections in each area for local and outgoing calls. It meant we didn’t have to have hardware out at every Fujitsu General site,” Barnes explains. It was a perceptive recommendation, minimising the hardware investment and ongoing maintenance that would be required of Fujitsu General’s IT team.

“Most of the other vendors wanted us to put servers in each location which only meant there would be more to manage,” Barnes adds.

The importance of planning

When the decision to proceed with UBS was made, there were still a couple of months to go before the actual physical office move. Barnes says, “This gave us nearly three months to prepare and get it right. UBS sat down with managers from all our different departments to work out their work and call flows.”

Mapping how each manager wanted the phone system to flow took almost one and a half months and it gave UBS the information essential to successfully configure the contact centre.

“UBS built it all in their lab then on the weekend we moved in, they put the system in, tested it and away we went. From the time we physically moved into the new office the phone system was fully bedded in within a week. There was no disruption to the business at all,” Barnes says.

Presence, cost savings and reporting

Staff reaction to the new phone system and its modern functionality has been very positive. “The software on our PCs means that we can now see on our screens who’s available and who’s not in the office. It’s much better than before when you might leave a message for someone to call you back and not know that they were on holidays for the next week!” Barnes smiles.

Within the call centre the Interactive Intelligence software is making life much easier. In-depth reporting is enabling management and staff to see how many calls are being received each day and to spot trends. For example, demand for air conditioning products tends to peak twice a year – in mid-summer and again in winter. This places additional strain on the contact centre but with the help of the reports, management can recognise changes in call patterns and more quickly determine optimal staffing levels.

Phone call costs are also expected to reduce due to VoIP savings on interstate calls and calls between offices.

Barnes notes that the UBS design for the VoIP system has also resulted in a much easier to administer and maintain phone system, enabling the IT department to turn its attention to other, more pressing requirements. “UBS designed the call flow for us and it still gets tweaked occasionally when we work out new and better ways of doing things. It’s a system that will continue to evolve,” he says.

“Right from the start UBS was always asking us how we felt about things and seeking our reactions to their recommendations. They have really exceeded all our expectations. They provide a great service and they know the technology. It’s a very good partnership,” Barnes concludes.

Fujitsu General Discovers the Benefits of Virtualisation with UBS –

Despite the calls from management text books for ever-greater speed, Fujitsu General (Aust.) Pty Limited understands that not all decisions should be rushed.  As one of Australia’s most successful and best known providers of air conditioning products, the company has learned that sometimes it pays to pause and fully consider a move before rushing in.

That’s why, when Fujitsu General first began to consider introducing virtualisation into its corporate data centre, the company conducted a two year trial to evaluate what the technology could offer and how it could best be deployed.

Matthew Barnes, Fujitsu General’s IT Manager says, “At the time we had around 30 different servers doing 30 different jobs and we liked the idea that virtualisation could reduce the amount of equipment that was needed.  When we did our last hardware roll-out in 2007 we decided to create a test environment and established one of the new servers as a virtual server. It was a basic virtualisation model but it gave us an idea of how smoothly the servers could run and how much maintenance was involved.”

The two year trial also gave Barnes time to test processing speed in the new environment and the potential consequences of issues such as hardware outages. He adds, “The virtual server did everything an everyday server could do. By the end of the trial it made sense to extend the environment and to virtualise the entire data centre.”

Keeping the business running

One of the biggest logistical issues involved in such a project is the need to maintain normal data centre operations so that the business can continue to function smoothly. Fujitsu General’s data centre supports between 150 and 200 staff and provides the processing for warehouses and branch offices located throughout Australia.  Barnes realised that the best way to ensure minimal impact on the business was to seek an experienced IT partner to design, develop and deploy the new environment.

After receiving advice and quotes from potential suppliers, Barnes appointed United Business Solutions (UBS), an IT services and solutions company focused on the corporate and government enterprise market.  UBS had recently completed a voice over IP (VoIP) and call centre deployment for Fujitsu General and Barnes was confident that the supplier had the skills to make the project a success.

“UBS has virtualised over 1,000 servers over the past five years and as a result we were confident in their ability to deploy robust high availability and virtualisation Infrastructure at Fujitsu General,” says Barnes.

UBS recommended replacing the 30 individual servers with five HP servers running VMware, an EMC storage area network (SAN), and an HP switching infrastructure.  .  Each of the HP servers would take on the load of up to five of the previous physical servers, thus reducing the total amount of hardware within the data centre.  The design included full redundancy and high availability of services with one management server and one back-up server.

It took just two months to install the equipment, build the platforms and migrate to the new environment. Despite some minor hiccups with servers, it was a very smooth project and was delivered on time.

A fail-safe infrastructure

When first investigating virtualisation Barnes’ biggest concern had been the need for redundancy. What would happen if a server failed?  Experience has since shown him that such worry was needless.

“The way our data centre has been set up it’s pretty redundant,” Barnes observes. “The management server handles all the virtual servers and the boxes that the servers sit on.  It’s smart enough to know that if one of the virtual servers is running slowly or if the load is too great, it shifts the load to another server. Everything happens live, without the user having to know about it.  Similarly, if one server fails, activity moves to another server that’s running well.”

Barnes says the main benefit of the virtualisation project is the reduction in physical equipment in the data centre.  “Cost-wise, there isn’t a great deal of difference because of the need for virtual licensing.  But with less hardware to maintain we don’t have to spend all our time repairing network servers, replacing network cards or hard drives.  We’ve gained more time to work on other projects.”

“My advice to others thinking about virtualisation is: Take your time. Do as much reading and research as you can and ask lots of questions. For many companies, what we did would probably be considered a small project but for us it was big.  The entire company’s IT infrastructure was involved and it was critical that the project succeed.  The good thing was that the more we worked alongside UBS, the better I understood what was required and how well it was all going to turn out,” Barnes adds.