Central Africa Building Society (CABS), Zimbabwe's largest building society, has improved its transaction times by almost 300 percent following the successful upgrade of its Sun Microsystems computer hardware environment.
"'Before' and 'after' performance figures show the average transaction time has dropped from .97 to .34 seconds following implementation of our new Sun E5500 server," says Mike Finnigan, deputy general manager of IT services at CABS. "This has resulted in vastly increased computer response times, enabling our staff to offer an improved services to all our clients."
The building society has long been recognised as an IT innovator in Zimbabwe, and was the first to introduce on-line banking in that country. It recently decided to upgrade its existing Sun servers to one of Sun's latest enterprise-class servers which are designed for customers running mission-critical applications requiring high performance levels in 24X7 uptime environments.
"A major requirement of our upgrade was to significantly improve performance," says Finnigan.
CABS chose the Sun E5501 server with an enhanced 100 MHz internal bus, concurrently upgrading to the latest 400 MHz processors, and enhancing the disk environment with A5000 disks, Sun's fibre attached (FCAL) storage solution.
Sun predicted significant performance improvements and proven to be correct with the CABS implementation. "Performance-enhancing the various components within an IT architecture does not necessarily guarantee total throughput improvements," says Ben Neveling, regional sales manager at Sun Microsystems SA. "However, looking at the excellent results achieved at CABS is once again proof of Sun's balanced architecture."
John Fanner, account manager at ICL Zimbabwe, which managed the sale and implementation, concurs: "It is very satisfying when predictions and sales talk really match up to excellent results," he says.
"With CABS as one of our key financial customers in Africa, we were not prepared to take any risks with the installation, and contracted the services of Sun Enterprise Services division specialists to assist with the implementation," says Fanner. "It is also customary to ensure technology knowledge transfer takes place with an installation of this complexity. We were delighted with the way ICL and CABS employees assisted, ensuring an excellent support base was left in Zimbabwe."
The new system was built in parallel to CABS' existing clustered system, and switched over by CABS and ICL.
The mission-critical nature of the CABS installation required Sun to build the upgraded environment in parallel to the production systems, test the new environment, and switch over. This switchover was executed jointly by ICL and CABS, proof again of the importance of the local support infrastructure.
The E5501 is one of Sun Microsystems' four new enterprise-class servers. They run the Solaris operating system and address the needs of technical, floating point-intensive customers by offering exceptional performance and the best scalability and availability for general-purpose high performance computing (HPC) servers in this class.
Share