Cash Services Australia partners with HP Gold Partner Datcom to refresh its technology infrastructure and increase its agility in the competitive financial services market.
Cash Services Australia (CSA) operates mission-critical computing technology built upon a high-availability framework. CSA chose HP and Datcom to build the replacement infrastructure because their experience and proven capabilities had consistently exceeded expectations over many years. The completed project enhanced CSA’s ability to adapt to changing market conditions quickly, and the robust environment can be scaled and adapted to meet the future needs of this fast-growing market leader.
HP technology and Datcom’s high-level expertise offer the skills we need to deliver exceptional service levels to our global customers.
Andrew Moss, Head of Projects & IT – Cash Services Australia
Client Overview
Cash Services Australia is a global leader in the field of optimising how a business manages its cash and currency supply chain. Cash management encompasses the secure transportation, processing and distribution of currency and reveals how organisations can maximise their return on cash reserves.
Australia currently has more than A$30Bn of cash in circulation, which grew by 7% during 2013-2014. The company is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and provides consulting services to many of the nation’s largest retailers.
Business Challenge
CSA reviewed their computing environment when business demands outpaced the capabilities of its existing technology. Their fleet of HP DL series servers had performed flawlessly, but their existing infrastructure stymied a need to yield productivity improvements and build a more agile framework.
Information technology underpins all CSA’s operations, and they depend on high-availability technology to ensure their mission-critical services are always online.
Partner and HP Solution
After a detailed analysis of utilisation and projected business requirements, CSA asked long-term partner Datcom to design a high availability sever cluster using blade arrays that could scale to meet planned growth forecasts. Datcom is a certified HP Gold partner with funded HP Solution Architects and possesses a wealth of experience in mission-critical system architecture and implementation.
Two identical C7000 blade chassis were selected for the primary and secondary data centres. These were populated with 8 BL460 processors to meet CSA’s existing requirements and easily scale for anticipated growth. The attraction of the blade topology was that it was easy to manage processing cycles and dynamically migrate resources on the fly.
This solution was needed to harness better utilisation from CSA’s virtualised infrastructure.
Business Outcome
The replacement solution reduced energy consumption by 60%, realising immediate cost savings and contributing to CSA’s sustainability goals. Because CSA’s technology team members were no longer required to visit their data centres twice a week, additional gains in productivity and cost reductions were achieved. The updated architecture enabled the automation of application load balancing and easier remote management of servers and storage in the physical and virtual realms.
This change improved efficiency giving the IT department more time to focus on strategic goals and develop improvements to processes and procedures. The new system also meets business scalability requirements with processing power upgrades, a simple matter of adding extra blades that can be installed without interruption to users.
Summary and conclusion
CSA’s business goal was to add capacity and build a solid platform that would enable new, more efficient ways to deliver better client outcomes. The HP hardware upgrade provided the optimum framework to deploy vSphere virtualisation software and simplify the management of CSA’s environment. It also enabled the automation of functions that increased agility and utilisation across the entire enterprise.
By reducing the need to visit their data centres regularly, CSA’s IT professionals have more time to devote towards increasing business efficiency and capitalising on the competitive advantages that their technology investment delivers.