UK foreign exchange giant virtualizes data center

Computerworld UK - Moneycorp, the UK foreign currency and payments company, is now supporting its services in a virtualized data center.

Founded in 1979, Moneycorp is a APS11bn provider of wholesale and commercial foreign exchange operations, with a growing network of bureau de change outlets and offering services to companies.

Moneycorp is using Adapt's Enterprise Virtual Data Centre (eVDC) fully hosted and managed system.

The deal will see Adapt deliver all of Moneycorp's production services with increased availability and performance, said Moneycorp, as well as strengthening the company's existing disaster recovery capabilities.

Kenneth Byrne, head of IT services at Moneycorp, said, "We wanted to significantly reduce the organisation's overall IT infrastructure risk by putting in place a highly resilient and reliable infrastructure, based around a dual data-center, mirrored-site offering."

Byrne said the company also wanted an infrastructure that would grow and scale to meet current and future expansion needs.

"We have managed to achieve both of these core aims quickly and at a competitive cost, allowing internal IT teams to re-focus from reactive hardware maintenance to more customer-centric and strategic input," said Byrne.

Adapt's eVDC has provided Moneycorp with synchronously replicated storage across two sites for maximum data and service availability.

Adapt has also provisioned a compute layer based on Cisco's UCS technology, coupled with VMware vSphere configured for maximum performance and memory/ CPU workloads.

In addition, Adapt procured and is managing a WAN infrastructure connecting Moneycorp's London offices using diverse carriers.