Financial services
Case Study:
Records management for Dubai IFC
28 April 2008
When the Dubai International Financial Centre needed a world-class records management and archive solution, it chose the HP Integrated Archive Platform
The Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), the world’s newest global financial hub, aims to develop the same stature as financial centres in New York, London and Hong Kong. Since opening in 2004, it has experienced substantial growth, and its data needs have grown tremendously.
DIFC realised that it needed a world-class records management and archive solution that would ensure compliance with financial and legal regulations, speed up the retrieval of e-mail and data, improve productivity and form the basis of an information lifecycle management (ILM) solution.
Having considered records management and archiving solutions from two companies, DIFC chose the HP Integrated Archive Platform (IAP), then known as HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System. This was the only complete, end-to-end solution from a single vendor designed with compliance in mind. DIFC felt that the competing solution was not well integrated, while HP offered a single contact for all support, along with a faster and more responsive architecture and a more robust feature set.
The HP IAP has enabled DIFC to ensure compliance with a wide variety of legal and financial regulations while speeding up the retrieval of e-mail, attachments and contacts. The solution also formed the basis of an ILM solution. Overall, the new infrastructure has helped to put DIFC on the path to becoming a globally recognised financial centre.
“The HP solution allows us to start thinking about how to build a complete ILM solution, not only for internal purposes, but to offer our customers as a value-added service,” says Samer Ghosheh, director of IT services at DIFC.
The solution is scalable to hundreds of terabytes and billions of objects without loss of performance, intelligently distributing content across a grid of storage smart cells. It also minimises storage costs and integrates all the required hardware software and services to provide a cost-effective, longterm storage appliance for reference information that delivers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry.
DIFC will gain a projected, cumulative five-year net benefit of $1.15 million (€776,461), driven by increased productivity for analysts, IT staff and other employees, and by removing the need to pay for new storage investments. The solution has a return on investment (ROI) of 361 per cent, and a payback period of 15 months.
“HP has been the ideal partner for us,” concludes Ghosheh. “They offered the only complete end-to-end solution with compliance in mind. Once they delivered it, they stood behind it and offered us the technical advice and support we needed.”
This case study featured in the Spring 2008 issue of Finance on Windows magazine