Case Study: Mees Pierson achieves major server consolidation and sub-hour disaster recovery with Virtustream

Mees Pierson - Customer Case Study

MeesPierson Guernsey, the Channel Island arm of Mees Pierson, operated more than 80 Windows and Linux servers supporting critical services (Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, file/print). With many servers nearing end-of-warranty and growing server sprawl, the bank wanted to consolidate and virtualize its ancillary systems without compromising reliability; the core IBM pSeries AIX banking system remained physical. The internal IT team had some virtualization experience but needed expert help to plan and implement an enterprise-wide consolidation.

Virtustream performed month-long performance benchmarking and designed an ESX-based architecture, recommending VMware ESX 3.0. They migrated the 80+ physical servers onto six ESX hosts on IBM hardware, split across two datacenters for disaster recovery, and completed rigorous testing with the internal team. The project delivered faster provisioning, centralized management, significant hardware and power (and carbon) savings, and a streamlined Business Continuity process with failover achieved in under an hour.

Mees Pierson