Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) today announced that its UK subsidiary has completed a database consolidation initiative with Nationwide Building Society which is expected to result in significant savings in energy and operational costs by 2012.
The programme, central to the bank's long-term Data Centre Transformation initiative, involved migrating more than 600 production databases and 170 systems off aging platforms approaching end of life in order to improve service performance and stability, while advancing Nationwide's sustainability goals.
Unisys managed a collaborative team of Unisys and Nationwide technical staff in the migration to a more streamlined Microsoft SQL Server database structure. The initiative involved upgrading to SQL Server 2005 and moving 36 SQL instances, encompassing 22 terabytes of data, to a new, fully supported production environment. The clustered solution offers high availability, by distributing load in the event of system failure.
"In taking steps to mitigate risk, we were faced with the challenge of migrating large numbers of critical databases and moving massive amounts of data. It was imperative that we worked with a supplier that we could trust," said Peter Stafford, Nationwide's IT director. "We were initially impressed by the depth and breadth of Unisys technical expertise and our subsequent experience bore out that impression. Through Unisys professional management of the initiative, we met all our targets and the project was delivered on time and under-budget. This was quite a feat for such a large scale IT deployment."
The project was carried out in five stages over two and half years. It was part of a wider multi-year programme to enhance the Building Society's IT architecture, while also reducing operational and energy costs. Unisys working relationship with Nationwide extends over 30 years and is central to the Building Society's Data Centre Transformation initiative, which also includes the successful virtualisation of 500 servers.
"At a time when CIOs must continually do more with less, it's increasingly imperative to have a focused strategy to transform the data centre to boost competitive advantage and manage costs," commentted Rob Chapman, vice president and managing director, UK, Middle East and Africa, Unisys. "The SQL migration project is just one aspect of a wider strategic programme to help Nationwide reap the full rewards of IT innovation. As a result, the work we have done together will help Nationwide become more agile, secure and efficient, and will save it money."