Cantor Fitzgerald / eSpeed

Critical Power Savings

Like many in the city, and even more so in Canary Wharf, power is at a premium. Many of the buildings were simply not designed to power so much technology. Consequently several sites are now at their limit of power consumption. One site recently reported they literally could not so much as install another light bulb it was so borderline.

Add to this scenario the cost of floor space and you can see why several large cabinets of VAX systems in an otherwise racked-up room not only look out of place but the power and aircon consumption were becoming more of an asset than the kit itself.

Time has moved on and the majority of IT staff no longer have any knowledge of VMS so its seen by many, who generally have no understanding of the apps either, as a target for the release of this critical power.

However, the VMS team at eSpeed did understand the importance and sought an alternative in migration. Swiftbase was not only able to migrate the applications in a very short amount of time but did it to the company's standard Windows server and the VAX practically vanished overnight.

Some may still ask what the two extra servers are doing, but not many now as they nestle neatly amongst the company's other servers (Proliant’s in this case), purring away quite nicely, no longer the target of uninformed pressure groups desperate for resources.

Other Benefits

Probably for these guys the best spin off was disaster recovery (DR). An offsite DR system had to be maintained and thanks to the underlying server technology we were able to cross-publish shares onto which we placed mountable VMS disks. These disks were mounted and imaged from the live system each night, meaning that an up-to-date backup was ready to run anytime.

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