Integrated Research’s mission-critical HP Storage and Server refresh increases productivity and enhances market agility.
“For almost a decade Datcom have delivered a exible approach backed with a can-do attitude.”
Andrew Mountford-Bunn, Team Leader – Internal Systems
Integrated Research (IR) is a global leader in providing software used for monitoring and managing mission-critical infrastructure. When they needed to refresh the internal systems, they chose HP and Datcom because both organisations had demonstrated their skills and technology were up to the challenge. The goal set by IR’s IT management team was to deliver exponential increases in productivity and improve the agility of their software development team. The new system has exceeded all of its most optimistic expectations. Development of new products has been streamlined thanks to the rapid orchestration of virtual customer environments, and the new technology enables IR developers to quickly diagnose and remedy anomalous operating behaviour.
Solution Benefits
- Improvements in developer productivity mean significantly lower production costs
- Faster development cycle ensures IR’s competitive advantage is maintained
- The replacement Infrastructure serves all business units delivering a rapid ROI
- The modularity of system design provides a flexible roadmap for future development
- Consolidation of data improves the security of IR’s valuable IP
Support engineers can quickly replicate a customer environment reducing the time required to analyse and remediate erroneous application behaviour.
Client overview
Integrated Research is a global leader in the development of software that monitors the operational status of mission-critical infrastructure. The Australian Stock Exchange (ASX: IRI) listed company develops its multi-award winning software application “Prognosis®” in the leafy harbourside suburb of North Sydney, Australia. The forward-looking company invests 20% of revenues back into research and product development. IR’s dedicated team of almost 70 software engineers re ne and optimise application performance to maintain their market leadership position. IR’s impressive client list is the envy of their competitors and includes half of the leading global stock exchanges and 9 of the top 10 biggest USA based banks. IR also leads the eld in monitoring the critical operations of telecommunications and service providers. IR is a respected Hewlett Packard business partner demonstrated by their relationship that spans decades. Prognosis® is also the preferred choice of the product selected by companies to manage their investment in HP’s NonStop mission-critical servers. Business Challenge Application development is costly and time consuming with rivals constantly adding new features in an attempt to erode IR’s dominant market share. The company needed to maintain its market leadership position and looked to technology consolidation as part of its productivity improvement project. The goals set by the IR management team were to reduce the time required to stage and orchestrate new development environments and build a single system that would consolidate administration IT and software development onto a single platform. The investment could be amortised across more of the business and provide a quicker ROI. An added bene t was that resources could be dynamically allocated to increase the utilisation of the infrastructure: processing power could be dedicated to a single task outside of business hours. The company reviewed its storage requirements and identified a performance limitation with their existing disk array. The system was unable to allocate storage based on whether capacity or performance was the best t for the task. Business processes have different computing requirements and the existing storage platform could not be adapted to meet the projected requirements. Partner and HP Solution HP hardware were selected because of the vendor’s product quality and the positive experience IR had previously received from HP’s proactive support and services team. IR has representative offices in the USA, Europe and Singapore and needed a global framework to full high-level support services. Integration partner Datcom was chosen to design, build, implement and provide local support and training for the new system. Datcom had shown on numerous occasions that their technical prowess was second to none and that their customer commitment extended well beyond the typical nine to ve of most system integrators. The migration of the Servers and Storage was staged in phases to ensure the integrity of the data and that sufficient time was allocated to intensively test the new environment. The new high-availability system design provided a redundant structure that lowered the chance of critical failures and loss of service delivery. This guaranteed that customer service levels could be maintained and mitigated the risk of costly, unplanned outages. The redesigned system also enabled building virtual clones of their customer operating environment and enabled support engineers to emulate and quickly remedy isolated faults.
“Increasing productivity is critical to delivering the best return on our research and development budget”
– Alex Baburin, Chief Operations Officer
“Project rollouts that required months of preparation can now be provisioned and deployed in a morning”
– Andrew Mountford-Bunn, Team Leader – Internal System
Business Outcome IR set high expectations for the technology refresh and their senior management were not disappointed with the results the upgrade delivered. Simple operational tasks that required weeks of detailed planning are now completed in o -peak times. Processing intensive tasks are now scheduled outside of business hours with 117GHz of CPU power harnessed and directed towards specific operations reducing the task completion time by hours. The improvements in productivity enable customer support team members to quickly solve issues and provide the latest patch updates more rapidly. The development team is more productive because virtual test machines can be rapidly commissioned with consistent and predictable operating parameters already configured. By reducing the number of variables in development and testing, performance improvements deliver better customer outcomes and enhance IR’s market esteem. Summary and conclusion Software developers rely on technology to create products that provide better outcomes for their customers. Their competitive advantage comes from lower costs of production through flexible agile methodologies and using the most e client technology to quickly deliver products to market. By selecting HP technology, IR can quickly embrace new market opportunities and adapt and build upon their existing IT investment. The company is planning to implement a virtual desktop environment and improve their storage array performance by adding solid state disks to reduce their time-to-market development cycle. All users have voiced their appreciation about the improved system responsiveness and this has increased productivity across the organisation.