Featured Case Study

Rabobank

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Design and build server virtualisation infrastructure

The Problem

Rabobank network management applications were running on a large number of machines under Solaris 8 for which support was ending. Both the hardware and the operating system were outdated, and therefore expensive to maintain and support.

There was a strong business case to reduce operational costs by upgrading and modernising the Solaris environment, including the network management applications. Additionally, this was an opportunity to improve stability and reduce risk through revision of server maintenance procedures.

How Competa Helped

With our extensive knowledge of Solaris, Competa redesigned the whole environment based on latest technology. Keeping a keen eye on manageability, security and fitness for the future resulted in a new environment based on Solaris 10 with the extensive use of new Solaris 10 features and SAN storage.

Solaris 10 features such as RBAC, BSM, SMF, ZFS and Projects have been put to full use to improve security, manageability and availability. Additionally, several platform services, such as LDAP and secure authentication, were upgraded and enhanced to further improve security and manageability.

Tools were put in place to reduce the time needed for maintenance and to minimise the risk of user error. All installations were standardized and automated with a complete new Jumpstart environment, which can also deploy Solaris Containers. Commissioning of the new systems included phasing out legacy systems and applications following successful migration.

Naturally, we fully documented and validated the environment - all administration procedures have been revised and augmented, and the System and Application Administrators have been trained on the new systems.

The Result

Our customer now has a complete new and up to date environment in which the number of production servers to maintain has dropped from more than 40 to only 6 - including a functional development, test and acceptance environment.

Changes can now be made quickly and in a controlled manner. Creation or recovery of a security-hardened and fully configured Solaris environment now takes less then 20 minutes!