Australian Finance Group

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Ranked as Australia’s number one wholesaler of mortgage finance and one of the top three wholesalers of mortgage finance in the world, the Australian Finance Group (AFG) acts as a specialist research, training and compliance house for its advisors, providing access to a vast array of financial products from Australia’s leading lending institutions.

AFG’s brokers — and the company’s bottom line — rely on one core business application, the Flex Mortgage Broking System. When the number of mortgage brokers using the system increased and the system began to slow down earlier this year, IT infrastructure manager Paul Blackman knew that an upgrade was critical. Also, it was apparent that the upgrade needed to do more than increase performance. “We had a number of servers behind the Flex System, each processing individual jobs, and the infrastructure had become a nightmare to manage from a technical point of view,” says Blackman. “It was also costing us a considerable amount of money in software licensing fees given that each disparate server required an Oracle Database license.”

After thorough consideration of a number of vendors, the company chose Sun to provide a solution that would increase performance but also reduce costs and simplify administration through consolidation. “We looked at alternative vendors but Sun proved they understood our business and could provide exactly what we needed,” says Blackman. “We also have a few Solaris experts in-house and we wanted to stick with it — particularly after we saw the added capabilities of Solaris 10.” AFG planned to move datacenters and wanted to start over with a system that was easy to manage and would scale for future growth. The old systems would then be used to power AFG’s disaster recovery center.

AFG chose three Sun Fire T2000 servers coupled with the Solaris 10 Operating System as the optimal consolidation solution. Based on the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology, the Sun Fire T2000 Server offers triple the throughput of competitive offerings while consuming half the power and half the size. By using the server’s multi-threading power and Solaris 10 Containers, AFG can run six separate environments on a single server. Sun Fire T2000 servers host the Oracle database, while two Sun Fire v490 servers host the Flex Mortgage Broking application. AFG also deployed a number of Sun Fire v210 servers as Web servers, backup servers, and development and test servers.

AFG had a tight timetable for the infrastructure refresh. The ability to create new environments within the Sun Fire T2000 Server with Solaris Containers allowed the company to migrate applications and implement new projects quickly and without any downtime. “The level of support we received from Sun together with the capabilities of the systems and software they provided made the upgrade quick and painless,” says Blackman.

Within six months of implementing the servers, AFG saved tens of thousands of dollars in software licensing fees. The Sun Fire T2000 servers have also significantly reduced AFG’s power and cooling costs by 50%. And with a 50% increase in system performance, the company will continue to reap the financial benefits of increased productivity for both staff and customers. Sun will continue to provide ongoing service support to AFG for the next three years to ensure business continuity. AFG is confident that the solution in place will provide the performance and scalability it needs through out that time.