Unitech completes data storage contract with First Active

Unitech Systems, the Irish technology services consultancy, has just completed a high level data storage contract for leading financial services company and mortgage provider First Active.

Unitech designed a technology solution to meet First Active's requirement for an improved data storage system that would allow for faster, more efficient access to existing information and would be sufficiently scalable to handle the massive growth of data generated by organisations in the financial services sector.

"What we needed and got from Unitech was a new and improved data storage

system, both in terms of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The new system

gives us improved performance from the existing servers, better application performance, and greater functionality in specific areas, such

as testing new applications," said Brian Murphy, IT Support Services

Manager, First Active.

The Unitech solution involved the implementation of the IBM enterprise storage server, as the main centralised disk storage system, and Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) software, to manage the backup and recovery of data within the mid-range Unix (AIX) environment.

The contract represents the first implementation in Ireland of the new IBM

enterprise storage server. Code-named "Shark", the new storage server is

the latest disk storage system developed by IBM to provide high performance and universal access to data across all computing environments.

The Unitech solution for First Active also involved consolidating the storage systems in First Active across multiple platforms, including Mainframe, NT, and Unix, onto a centralised disk server environment. The purpose of this type of consolidation was to provide increased functionality and improved backup and recovery capability.

"Being able to cope with the explosion of data that e-commerce is generating, and being able to manage all this information effectively, is an enormous task that faces all modern organisations, and data heavy organisations like financial services companies, in particular," said Tomas O'Leary, sales & marketing director, Unitech Systems.

"The system that we have put in place for First Active allows the company to store, and have access to, all of its data on a constant 24 by seven basis, efficiently and cost-effectively. Also, by having this state-of-the art technology installed, First Active now has the building blocks for a storage area network," said O'Leary.

"Having the capacity to develop a storage area network is seen by many industry observers as being an area of crucial importance for companies, as the amount of data being generated is increasing exponentially in many organisations," he said.