Financial Software Limited transforms service delivery

Financial Software Limited (FSL) is a leading financial software company that has supported clients in the UK financial markets for over 16 years. FSL currently delivers its applications and services to more than 75 clients, who range from some of the UK’s largest financial institutions to smaller investment management funds and banks.

Adapting to a changing market
Founded as an independent software vendor (ISV), FSL has developed a range of innovative applications for investment management and taxation. Changing market trends, however, have driven an increase in the demand for more innovative service delivery models.

“What we have seen recently is that more and more companies are moving away from the traditional model of simply buying software and then installing it on their own systems,” remarks Joe Hughes, Senior Technical Consultant at Financial Software Limited. “We realised that one way to help our customers maximise efficiencies was to broaden the scope of our service offerings and develop a software-as-a-service [SaaS] solution. Now, in addition to selling software, we also provide hosting services for our application portfolio.”

Maintaining exceptional service levels
Response to FSL’s new service offerings has been impressive, and the company realised that if it was to maintain the high levels of service that customers had come to expect, it needed to improve the scalability and flexibility of its existing IT environment.

FSL decided to approach IBM Business Partner Techgate in its search for a solution. “We have been using Techgate’s managed hosting services for several years now, and have been very pleased with the level of support that we have received,” states Hughes. “We came to Techgate with a new set of requirements for our hosted environment, and the team proposed that we move away from a physical server infrastructure and onto a highly virtualised environment.”

Dynamic cloud environment
Techgate worked with FSL to design and implement a fully managed private cloud solution, running on IBM System x3550 M4 servers with a dedicated storage area network (SAN). Techgate began by converting FSL’s physical architecture to a virtual environment, using VMware vSphere. As the first operating system specifically designed for cloud deployments, vSphere transforms physical hardware into a shared, virtualised environment that can scale to meet dynamic workloads on demand. Using the ESXi hypervisor architecture included in VMware vSphere 5, Techgate partitioned a large number of virtual machines on six IBM System x servers.

Martin Wright, Managing Director of Techgate, comments: “Running VMware vSphere on IBM System x servers provides us with an optimum environment for enabling cloud computing. We consider IBM and VMware to represent the ideal combination of hardware and software elements for facilitating modern virtualised infrastructures.”

Techgate established a dual-site configuration for the cloud environment, hosting FSL’s main production systems at its primary data centre, which is located within the IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services facility in Chelmsford, Essex. A second virtual platform was built at another Techgate data centre in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, and will provide disaster recovery capabilities in the event of system downtime.

IBM System x3550 servers deliver high availability and scalability, providing an efficient, secure base for FSL’s private cloud environment. Multiple System x3550 servers are used to run the company’s production systems, with an equivalent number of servers being housed in Techgate’s second data centre and used for disaster recovery.

Techgate took a phased approach to the migration, ensuring that FSL was able to provide uninterrupted services to its customers throughout the project. “The entire migration was handled very smoothly,” says Hughes. “The team from Techgate worked hard to ensure that we were kept well informed during every stage of the project, and promptly resolved any minor bumps that we experienced along the way.”

Reliable, cost-effective disaster recovery
To provide failover capabilities between the two hosting sites, Techgate is using VMware Site Recovery Manager 5. This disaster recovery solution leverages vSphere Replication to deliver simple and powerful replication of applications to Techgate’s secondary data centre, along with fully automated site recovery and migration.

“The new cloud environment has massively reduced risk for us as a company,” notes Hughes. “As our applications on the virtual machines can be automatically moved from one ESXi host to another, it doesn’t matter if a physical server fails. In the highly unlikely event that the main data centre goes down entirely, VMware Site Recovery Manager will provide automatic failover to a second data centre. This will allow us to get our systems back up and running in just minutes, compared to the days it would have taken to recover our data from tape storage in the past. In this way, we can almost completely eliminate downtime for our clients.”

Additionally, leveraging VMware Site Recovery Manager in a dual data centre configuration provides a cost-effective disaster recovery solution for FSL. Techgate can run the backup cloud platform at much lower specifications and consuming fewer resources than an equivalent physical server configuration.

“Disaster recovery solutions are often seen as a necessary, but costly service,” explains David Reeve, Enterprise Services Director at Techgate. “With VMware Site Recovery Manager, we have been able to develop a secondary cloud platform for FSL that delivers a 30 percent cost saving, when compared to the expense of building and maintaining a duplicate physical environment.”

Highly flexible solution
With its new cloud platform, FSL has gained the flexibility it needs to meet the changing demands of a growing client base and to guarantee high levels of customer service. IBM System x3550 servers provide high levels of scalability, making them ideal for consolidating large numbers of virtual machines onto a single server, and for virtualising the large databases and mission-critical workloads that FSL hosts for its customers.

“It is much quicker and easier for us to add more resources as we need them, which is critical to us as we continue to grow and provide hosted application services for more clients,” says Hughes. “Our applications are highly customised, which means that every time we develop a new version of a particular application, we have to provision a new server for testing and development, as well as a standalone production environment. In the past, it would take us up to three weeks to provision new hosted application environments on our physical servers. Now, we can get an application up and running in under two hours.”

Imran Khan, Managing Director of Financial Software Limited, concludes: “When we started this project, we had two main requirements: we were looking for a solution that would enable us to rapidly scale production to meet changing demand and that would guarantee near-constant uptime for our operations. The cloud platform that Techgate has developed for us has absolutely delivered on these requirements, and allows us to provide better service to our clients at a lower cost, helping to boost our competitive edge.”