Daewoo Securities

Story Details

In today’s competitive economy, a financial institution must offer clients access to their portfolios 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as well as stay in constant contact with markets around the world. That’s a tall order, but one that marks the difference between industry leaders and competitors trying to keep pace.

Daewoo Securities Company, one of the top brokerages in South Korea, was searching for a reliable, simple management solution for the IT platform that supported its mission-critical securities trading system and Web interface. The platform was composed of Sun Fire E10000, 3800, and 4900 servers, as well as third-party devices and applications. Key databases and transactional records for online trading were stored on a Sun StorageTek PowderHorn 9310 tape library and a Sun StorageTek L700 tape library.

Daewoo's main concerns were to improve availability for its online trading services and reduce the number of time-consuming service calls. Expertise with Sun servers and storage hardware was also key.

After reviewing a number of leading support vendors in the market, the company engaged Sun Multivendor Services, which had just entered the Korean market. This arrangement gave Daewoo a single point of contact for managing its Sun environment, including direct access to the Sun Escalation Service if problems develop.

In addition to fixing problems, Daewoo also wanted to reduce the chance of problems cropping up at all. It engaged Sun Preventive Services, a unit of Sun Managed Services, to provide a realistic assessment of its datacenter’s health based on measurable risk indicators, plus a treatment plan and incentives for maintaining improvements. The multidimensional, preventive model is designed to change datacenter support from “hoping nothing goes wrong” to planning and management that can improve the datacenter's performance and provide a competitive advantage.

After Sun Preventive Services conducted a comprehensive assessment of the people, processes and products that affected the company's datacenter operations, it created an improvement and implementation plan to enable Daewoo’s datacenter to support the company’s aggressive business goals.

Initially, Daewoo was skeptical, believing that proactive maintenance would be unnecessary work. However, Sun Preventive Services soon demonstrated their value. The number of break-fix calls dropped by 75 percent ─ from 80 calls in a six-month period to just 20 calls. “We are very enthusiastic now about the value of preventive services, having seen Sun's technical proficiency demonstrated,” said Cheol Hee Lee, Senior Manager, System Support Department of the Information Technology Center, Daewoo Securities.

Also, availability, which is critical to Daewoo’s online trading services, has been improved from 99.8 percent to 99.95 percent, a decrease in monthly downtime from 88 to 21 minutes.

Due to its partnership with Sun, Daewoo Securities has been able to ensure a high level of service to its customers, giving it a true competitive edge in the marketplace.