Smart solutions are in the Post
By Leslie Faughnan
Postbank.ie and One Direct are well-known brands of Postbank, which is the An Post financial services subsidiary and is backed by BNP Paribas Fortis. Employing over 250 at its two locations in Dublin and Athlone, it completed a major virtualisation project early last year.
“Replacing our existing server infrastructure was the main goal because much of it was near end of life,” said Oisin MacMahon, head of IT.” Taking the virtualisation route offered clear value in consolidating the hardware and improving efficiencies in serving the business and in manageability of systems.”
Working with PFH as its project consultant, the carefully planned project was physically accomplished in just two months.
Postbank consolidated from 34 server boxes to just six.” For me, the outstanding result is the resilience and replication we have achieved at a reasonable cost,” MacMahon said.
“We had multiple servers in clusters in the old architecture, most of them not doing a lot really. With the virtual infrastructure we have more power and flexibility at lower costs. We can now roll out new line of business applications very quickly.”
Postbank also achieved a smart disaster recovery solution cheaply, MacMahon said.” The full disaster recovery exercise, which used to take three days, has been fully carried out and tested in less than three hours.” He said that the whole project, with its wide range of direct business benefits, had a payback period of less than two years.
