FIMBank's innovation and leadership in information technology has been used as a basis for a case study commissioned by global technology vendor HP.

The study shows that FIMBank has enabled growth in new business areas with HP blade servers and virtualisation.

With the new HP Blade Servers, FIMBank has transformed its data centre to one that is flexible, highly innovative and able to provide the necessary capacity for future growth while achieving critical savings in energy and space costs, and operating costs, resulting in an impressive 300% return on investment (ROI) in five years.

Executive Summary from FIMBank

 

The FIMBank Group is a global provider of trade related financial services.

Established in 1994, FIMBank has steadily grown its trade finance operations, now spanning four continents. Supported by a world-class regulatory environment and a strategic hub position through its head office in Malta, FIMBank has built a formidable reputation for its ability to unlock niche emerging markets and deliver underprovided trade finance products.

 

FIMBank's strategy is to further strengthen its global presence and enhance the range of products it offers, namely: factoring, forfaiting, structured commodity finance, and supporting services.

 

FIM Business Solutions Ltd (FBS) is a business systems provider and technology

management services firm. Established in 2005 as a fully owned-subsidiary of the

FIMBank Group, FBS is an offshoot of the FIMBank IT management team and was set up primarily to service the FIMBank Group as well as international FIMBank joint venture companies.

 

In 2004, FIMBank anticipated an obstacle to the growth it had enjoyed for eight years.

 

Its IT landscape, characterised by older servers with directly attached storage, was no longer able to meet the growing needs of the business. With data storage capacity unevenly utilised and difficult to manage, server performance suffered. Batched processing was taking a significant amount of time and often fraught with problems, which in turn led to impasses in the backup procedures. Given those circumstances, the IT department anticipated issues related to coping with increasing demands.

 

Furthermore, FIMBank faced constraints particular to Malta which compounded the issues: steep shipping charges on all imported goods, extremely high real estate costs and expensive energy resources. It was clear that any new solution would need to be more compact and more energy-efficient than the previous environment. At the same time, FIMBank wanted to leverage their current IT’s infrastructure while investing to gain the flexibility and agility required to adapt to fast-hanging business demands.

 

FIMBank's objectives for the IT upgrade included: a seamless and painless move to new servers, a substantial consolidation of the IT infrastructure, optimisation of data storage and physical space through virtualisation, automation of manual processes, flexibility and resiliency. A good match on all counts, the high quality and reliability of cutting-edge HP technologies, coupled with the availability of competent and experienced local implementation partners, made HP an obvious choice for the project.

 

FIMBank's new HP infrastructure has produced tangible and substantial economic gains through reduced energy and cooling consumption. This is due in part to a reduction in the number of physical servers required to provide the same or greater functionality (a blade can accommodate up to 30 virtual servers, depending on resource requirements). Another significant contributing factor is the higher energy efficiency of HP BladeSystems technology. Taking into consideration, the Malta upcharge for new hardware acquisitions (+ 20% or more), and avoidance of future purchases dramatically increases the potential of that economic benefit.

 

FIMBank has also been recognised as a trend-setting technological innovator in

Malta and has reduced its carbon footprint - a good example of the "green effect”

energy-saving innovation using less power and less space.

Technology Benefits-flexibility and standards

Through the upgrade of its IT environment to HP BladeSystem technology, the FBS team has been able to achieve significant improvements in the data centre:

 

�The number of physical servers has been consolidated through virtualisation.

Not only does this mean that the data centre footprint will not need to increase, but significant extra server capacity for growth is already foreseen without needing to add any more hardware. (FBS accommodates five-six virtual servers per physical server due to compute-intensive processing requirements).

 

Virtualisation has also enabled FBS to respond more efficiently to changing business demands. The use of VMware with HP BladeSystems servers allows the FBS team to build and deploy servers 19 times faster than before.

 

FIMBank's previous ~15GB of direct attached storage were poorly utilised.

Through centralisation and improved allocation with the HP Storageworks

EVA 3000, storage capacity is much better allocated and utilised.

 

Automation has greatly streamlined IT processes and work flows, resulting in

a flexible, agile and resilient network. With automation, the batch processes have been sped up from four hours to less than one (50 minutes). This freed up a part-time dedicated resource for other tasks.

Backup to disks provides faster, more reliable file backup and recovery options and improved overall resiliency.

When necessary, automated recovery now takes only 10 minutes, as compared to two hours previously, further ensuring high system availability and increased productivity. FBS can now proactively manage its network, rather than reacting to failures.

 

Built-in Value of HP Investment - saving time and money

 

Thoughtware Worldwide’s analysis showed that the HP tools produce economic benefits primarily around the more efficient and effective use of resources - whether those are human, capital, physical-space or energy resources:

Time and effort savings in setting up systems to support a new joint venture

Cost savings through reduced cooling and power consumption.

Space-savings through virtualisation and server consolidation.

Deferment or avoidance of additional equipment purchase through virtualisation and server consolidation

Productivity gains through central and proactive management of servers and storage

Productivity gains through replacement of manual batch processes with automated processes, which are also more robust.

Reliability and business continuity through faster automated recovery