Intel today announced that Nedbank, a leading South African bank, has completed the migration of its mission-critical 64-bit SAS business intelligence data-warehousing system to Intel Itanium 2 processor-based Unisys ES7000 servers, increasing operational efficiency and driving new revenue streams.
The new platform immediately delivered a tenfold performance improvement in processing enterprise and customer information, enabling Nedbank to better respond to customer needs, deliver consistent service across all channels and measure its profitability, performance and operational risk. The bank estimates it will achieve significant cost savings per year by maximising the value of information centrally held on EMC CX600 CLARiiON storage systems.
The new Itanium-based business intelligence solution, developed jointly by Intel, Unisys, Microsoft, EMC and SAS, delivers outstanding scalability and performance, allowing Nedbank to significantly expand its business intelligence operations by increasing the number of data marts it can develop and amount of information that can be analysed.
The new architecture has reduced the time taken to complete some data processing jobs from two days to a matter of hours and will scale to handle 45 terabytes of information within five years. The new solution`s ability to process, analyse and manage data-intensive tasks was evaluated at Unisys` Centre of Excellence, Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Intel Itanium 2-processor based Unisys servers will support over 2 000 employees across all Nedcor`s Retail operations. The bank will use the new solution to analyse business processes against targets, evaluate customer use to improve service levels and define business strategy.
"Our data-processing and analysis requirements put increasing strain on our systems, and we ran out of headroom by mid-2003," said Adrian Mattioli, Data Warehouse Delivery Manager at Nedcor.
"Unisys` extensive experience in implementing high-end Windows-based enterprise applications, the expandability new Itanium 2 processor based ES7000 system allows us to enhance the value of our data, by delivering the performance and scalability that powers business intelligence to drive new competitive advantage. Technology is a lifeline for increasing efficiency and delivering unprecedented customer service. In addition, the latest release of the SAS business intelligence suite (SAS 9.1) benefits greatly from the parallel processing power enabled by the EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) technology in the Intel Itanium 2 architecture. The new solution helps equip Nedbank for long-term growth and success in the face of global competition."
At Nedbank Retail, SAS Business Intelligence 9.1 64-bit is powered by Intel Itanium 2 processor-based Unisys ES7000 servers, running Microsoft* Windows Server 2003 64-bit Datacenter Edition. The solution includes EMC CLARiiON Storage and EMC Software.
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