UPG gets credit for a professional IT refresh

UPG is a credit card processing hub based in the UK, responsible for mediating payment information between merchants and banks for online transactions. Due to the nature of its business, the company requires 24/7 availability, 365 days a year. To this end, it employs multiple data centres with high failover capacity as a disaster recovery (DR) strategy.

Feeling the need for a refresh

UPG’s previous high availability strategy involved running a large number of redundant devices, but this was beginning to create significant overheads for the business. “As the price of power and cooling was increasing year-on-year, our legacy system became increasingly uneconomical,” says Miles Carroll, Chief Executive Officer at UPG. “In total we had 14 cabinets containing hundreds of servers, which also led to expensive IT maintenance costs.”

UPG wanted a way to reduce its IT spend whilst maintaining a high level of availability for its mission-critical web applications. In order to achieve this, the company needed to implement a consolidated, virtualised server platform with excellent fault-tolerance.

Choosing the right solution

As the service life of UPG’s legacy hardware came to an end, the company began to investigate ways to reduce its server landscape and attendant power requirements while maintaining the high availability required to maintain its web-based service offering.

“Our legacy system was built to task and built to last, but this made it extremely inflexible,” says Miles Carroll. “We wanted to refresh our server landscape with virtualisation, but we needed a strong, experienced business partner to help us move forward.”

UPG engaged IBM Business Partner Celerity to implement two IBM BladeCenter H chassis, each with six Intel Xeon processor-based HS21 and HS22 blade servers. Both chassis are connected to a pair of IBM System Storage N3400 network-attached storage units, which provide high-performance disk storage. Most of the blade servers were virtualised with VMware vSphere 4.1, which runs Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux images. The exception is UPG’s transactional databases, which run on two non-virtualised blades. The second of UPG’s three data centres is currently receiving the same technical upgrade as the primary site. A mirror image of IBM hardware and UPG payment software is currently in testing prior to replacing the legacy systems.

“We evaluated a number of different vendors’ solutions for delivering UPG’s next-generation technical platform,” says Ross Leak, Head of Infrastructure at UPG. “Ultimately, we settled on the IBM solution, as Celerity’s proposed server architecture and technical expertise impressed us the most, and the low annual service costs suggested that IBM hardware might be more reliable than competitors’ products.”

The system was configured in an active/passive/passive set-up, with two failover sites and six layers of redundancy. Each of UPG’s BladeCenter chassis can handle four times its normal total load in the event of a disaster scenario, meaning that traffic would only need to be manually redirected under extreme circumstances.

Setting a new industry standard

Getting the new infrastructure approved for use proved to be a challenge for UPG. “Our industry is regulated by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), which has very strict rules about network security,” explains Miles Carroll. “However, these rules were drawn up for the fixed networks and devices that predominated before virtualisation became common. This posed a problem, as our VMware software meant we were running multiple virtual networks all sharing the same fixed resources. As a Tier 1 provider, it is critical that credit card security is achieved without compromise.

“Within our industry, network security is paramount. Throughout the entire project life cycle UPG consulted and were advised by our security partners and PCI:DSS auditors,” says Ross Leak. “We conducted over a year of network hardening, controls and ethical hacking techniques targeted specifically against our new platform. We proved that our next generation payment platform was considerably more fault tolerant and secure than a traditional non-virtualised environment.”

From the installation of the solution to the present day and beyond, Celerity continues to provide technical support and training services.

“We’ve been working with Celerity for two years now, and it’s been a very positive experience,” says Miles Carroll. “We purchased professional training services as part of the total solution, and their team did a lot of excellent staff mentoring alongside the essential knowledge transfer. Our in-house staff are now essentially self-sufficient, but it’s still comforting to know that Celerity are always on the end of the phone, and can co-ordinate effective, timely responses whenever we reach the edge of our technical knowledge.

“Thanks to Celerity’s deep knowledge of virtualisation, we were able to give a full account of our network security to the PCI-DSS auditor, who provided the PCI DSS 2.0 certification we needed. It was a giant leap forward for all concerned, but it was definitely a step worth taking.”

Reducing power, boosting performance

Since refreshing its server landscape with the new hardware, UPG’s business has benefited significantly. “Changing to a virtualised BladeCenter environment was certainly a bold step, as our experience with the PCI-DSS bore out, but it’s definitely proved worthwhile,” says Miles Carroll. “Within the space of a few months, we reduced our server landscape by 85 percent, and cut our power and cooling requirements by a similar amount.”

Administration tools installed on the IBM BladeCenter servers provides an improved machine interface, allowing UPG’s system administrators to gain a consolidated view of their hardware.

“Since we installed the BladeCenter servers, the task of system administration is so much easier,” says Ross Leak. “BladeCenter servers are highly available by design, with fault-tolerance built in. We’ve not experienced any problems yet, but if the BladeCenter detects an impending component failure, it sends an automatic email to an IBM team, who will come and replace the component themselves.”

Despite reducing its server landscape so significantly, UPG has leveraged the high performance of the BladeCenters to increase its throughput by a factor of 15.

“One unexpected boon of the solution is that it’s turned out to be a great sales tool and growth enabler for the business,” says Miles Carroll. “Our customers were so impressed by our investment in premium equipment that we actually grew by 75 percent at the revenue line and 70 percent at the profit line during a time of economic recession – all with the same staff levels as before.”

Today, the company remains confident that it chose the right solution. “In IBM and Celerity, we found the perfect partners to realise our ambition to grow the business,” concludes Miles Carroll. “The BladeCenter solution is more robust than any other system we’ve used in the past. With it, we’ve gained the confidence of our customers, banks and industry regulators, as well as substantially increasing our profitability.”