Major Luxembourg Bank Benefits from Halian’s Sun Microsystems Experience

Introduction

A major European Bank with one of the largest banking infrastructures in Luxembourg has engaged Sun Microsystems and Halian to provide critical round the clock support and engineering. The support not only requires specialist skill sets but also need to be combined with technical and service experience.

With a clearly defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place the support covers the bank’s Luxembourg locations as well as 15 other remote locations across the world.

Background

In the banking world time is money and so delivering the right level of support was critical for the bank to operate without any downtime.

The banks IT infrastructure was made up of high availability clusters including E-25Ks, E-15Ks and E-10Ks. Sun Microsystems recognized the need to bring in a trusted partner with access to specialist skills sets and resources to ensure the successful delivery of the service.

Ultimately, Halian was chosen for their proven ability to support heterogeneous systems, including Oracle, Wintel and UNIX; as well as their record for delivering 24 X 7 mission critical support using ITIL guidance to a number of high profile Sun customers.

An extensive and highly experienced support team of 20 people from Halian are working within the operations and engineering department on site. They are providing high levels of support whilst meeting the SLA objectives defined with the bank.

Solution

Halian is providing first line support for a combination of IT systems, which in turn are running many mission critical applications configured to provide optimum resiliency and multiple levels of redundancy at all levels. As well as providing 24 X 7 support Halian is also carrying out proactive maintenance to ensure that the applications high availability requirements are achieved and where possible exceeded.

Due to the very nature of the project high levels of service were required. Only one hour outages were permitted, planned or unplanned, and so Halian ensured they had the right team of experienced people in place to provide critical 24 X 7 support.

Halian delivers onsite support from 7 am to 11 pm everyday, with on call support to cover any problems that may occur out of hours. The processes that have been implemented by Halian are not only ITIL compliant, but ensure that escalation of any serious issues are dealt with in a matter of minutes and more serious incidents requiring regular 10-minute update calls to the client. This experienced Halian team regularly log incidents, as well as alert key personnel to any problems whilst working hard to resolve the issues.

Outcomes/Benefits

Halian has been able to provide a substantial amount of experienced resource and skills to support this vitally important project for Sun Microsystems on one of the largest banking infrastructures in Luxembourg. As well as having the necessary technical skills, the Halian team also possessed the relevant service mentality and business and industry skills to guarantee a good cultural fit and ensure successful results.

With the project set to run until the end of 2010 the team continues to grow to meet the demands and needs of the bank.