Hardware refresh for a leading financial service provider in Germany
Our client is the largest cooperative bank in Germany and the leading financial services provider in the healthcare sector. Their current datacenter consists of 472 servers with 972 CPUs. They were looking to upgrade these servers for enhanced performance and to reduce the company’s carbon footprint.
The Challenge
Our client sought to update its existing datacenter infrastructure to improve performance and efficiency while aligning with its sustainability goals.
- Energy inefficiencies: The outdated processors consumed excessive power, leading to higher energy costs and negatively impacting the client’s sustainability initiatives
- Aging hardware: The data center hardware had surpassed its optimal lifespan, increasing the risk of hardware failure and downtime
- Cost constraints: The client aimed to achieve better performance and sustainability without significantly increasing the IT budget
The Objective
The goals of the partnership between HCLTech and the client were to:
- Recommend enhanced hardware configuration for the existing servers
- Achieve optimal performance and lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Comparative analysis of different processors while migrating
The Solution
The HCLTech team proposed utilizing the Intel Xeon Processor Advisor, a powerful tool that assesses the bank's current infrastructure and recommends the most suitable Intel Xeon processors to meet its specific requirements. HCLTech assisted in workload rightsizing, generating recommendations for processor migration and optimizing the bill of material to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).
Intel XPA benefits:
- Workload analysis: Analyzes workload characteristics and requirements for optimized processor selection
- Performance and efficiency optimization: Considers performance metrics and power efficiency to optimize performance and reduce energy consumption
- Compatibility and platform considerations: Ensures compatibility with existing or planned system infrastructure
- Scalability and futureproofing: Provide insights on scalability and support for future technologies
- Cost analysis: Assists in cost optimization by considering the price-performance ratio
The Impact
The implementation of HCLTech’s solution, supported by Intel SMEs, resulted in the following outcomes for the client:
- Cost reduction: The client achieved significant cost savings through optimized hardware selection and configuration, including the right processors recommended by Intel SMEs. This led to a reduction of 126 servers, resulting in reduced operational and maintenance costs.
- Improved performance: Rightsizing workloads and migrating to suitable processors enhanced system performance, enabling the client to meet their demanding requirements efficiently.
- Enhanced technology investment: By selecting the most appropriate processors and optimizing the hardware configuration, the client maximized the value of their technology investments, ensuring optimal performance and resource utilization.
- Architecture recommendation + TCO optimization
- Overall reduction from 472 servers to 346, with huge savings on software licensing too
