Profiled:

Banquo Credit Management

3 August 2007

London-based Banquo Credit Management takes pride in delivering innovative credit portfolio management solutions and services to institutional investors around the world. Founded in 2004, the firm has grown steadily by leveraging industry-standard financial solutions and the expertise of its experienced investment partners.

Banquo depends heavily on a heterogeneous network of best-of-breed financial systems, many running on vendor-specified platforms. In the summer of 2006, Banquo's head of IT, Brad Mansfield, began researching ways to provide the firm's diverse infrastructure with centralised storage. Dependence on direct-attached storage had reached its limits, leaving little flexibility to accommodate business growth and putting a strain on IT resources. However, Mansfield found few storage technologies that met the firm's critical requirements for reliability, availability, scalability, cost- effective operation, and ease of management.

Then the firm learned of a new HP StorageWorks system that looked promising: "The HP All-in-One system runs Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 and uses an HP-designed management interface to hide the storage complexity; these building blocks made it familiar looking and easy to use," says Mansfield. "It was far less expensive than anything else we had looked at, yet offered the capacity and capabilities we needed."

The system's primary software includes HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage Manager; HP Data Protector Express; Microsoft Office Suite; Windows Storage Server 2003 R2; Windows Server 2003; Exchange Server 2003; SQL Server 2005; Microsoft ASP.NET development environment and Veritas Backup Exec software.

Mansfield deployed the new HP StorageWorks AiO600 in Banquo's London headquarters to provide space for the firm's development team to store test data, software and documents. The AiO600, with three-terabyte capacity, provides overflow storage for the firm's ten servers, reducing overhead on critical trading platforms and financial analysis systems.

By consolidating and centralising storage management with the HP AiO600, Banquo has been able to improve overall storage utilisation across the heterogeneous environment. "We are a small firm and cannot afford to have multiple storage devices, each requiring a different expertise," Mansfield explains. "The HP All-in-One system is a sensible and straightforward way to consolidate and reduce overall storage management at the same time. Where we used to spend hours sometimes fiddling with partition allocation, we now can do those chores in less than ten minutes on the HP AiO using the All-in-One Storage Manager interface."

The HP AiO provides hardware RAID, hot-plug drives, and automatic event alerts for enhanced reliability and business continuity resilience. "Our number one priority is infrastructure availability," says Mansfield. "We operate on a 24/7 basis and downtime is not an option. Not only is the HP AiO very reliable, but it also makes it easier for us to protect the consolidated data we store there. It's much easier to back up data to tape from a centralised location than to back up each serer individually."

Mansfield concludes: "The HP AiO600 has provided an easy way to archive and still enable online access to daily transaction records, including spreadsheets, file histories, and other data. The time savings I have gained represent one of the most important benefits to me. The AiO's ease of management, scalability, and reliability make it a real asset to our operation. It will give us room to grow, and if personnel changes the intuitive operation makes training easier."