Customer Stories

posted on 08 May 2008 11:54

Threadneedle Investments was founded in 1994 and manages £67.7 billion of assets providing investment services for pension schemes, insurers, private investors, corporations, mutual funds and affiliate group companies. 

It employs over 130 investment professional staff in London, England. and is a subsidiary of Ameriprise Financial, a US financial planning and services company with more than 12,000 financial advisors and registered representatives that was formerly known as the American Express Financial Corporation.

Threadneedle has customers in 15 countries, across four continents and has over 600 staff members in ten European countries, including the UK.

Basically it has a fair number of staff managing a massive amount of investments and they all use computers to do their job. Owning, operating and managing its data centre infrastructure in the UK is a major undertaking but not one that is core to Threadneedle's business: essential; yes, but core; no.

This realisation was prompted by the increasing raft of compliance legislation and tighter legal regulation affecting Threadneedle.

So Threadneedle decided to outsource it and contracted Affiniti, a communications integrator, to do it, to handle the outsourcing of its non-core business operations including management of its data assets and IT business recovery infrastructure, over a 5-year term. The Affiniti proposal involved the consolidation of Threadneedle's five data centres allowing huge economies of scale, large cost-savings in other words. It also involved the outsourcing of Threadneedle's communications.

It helped that Affiniti is currently two years into a three year contract for the management of Threadneedle’s Storage Area Network (SAN).

From five to two

In conjunction with its partner, SunGard, Affiniti has migrated all of Threadneedle’s London-based IT to two new data centres, based in the south east of England. These tier 4 data centres are connected, but operate independently, to ensure that Threadneedle’s IT equipment continues running with little or no impact to service  in the event of a disaster.

The rationalisation of property from five to two sites has ensured that Threadneedle immediately benefited from 'massively reduced operational costs.' The two centres are also cheaper to run than the five they replace and have a much more resilient infrastructure, which is significantly easier to manage than the old set-up. 

Storage aspect

In the final phase of the project, which commenced in December, Threadneedle and Affiniti went through a storage consolidation evaluation to ascertain the best storage design for Threadneedle’s information assets. They settled on EMC's Symmetrix storage arrays.

One EMC DMX4 storage array has been installed in each of the two data centres, each array capable of holding up to 66TB of data.

Basically they chose a large enterprise-class, monolithic storage array and use each data centre to backup the other. It's a fairly straightforward design - in concept - and serves to illustrate the strength of EMC's appeal to large customers. They trust it to supply storage products that do the business for their data centres. It is as simple and as important as that.

^{[Chris Mellor, editor.]}