Histórias de sucesso da empresa - Allianz Global Investors
Allianz Global Investors Improves IT Efficiency and Application
Perfil
Allianz Global Investors
"Since implementing the AMD Opteron™ processor-based virtualization solution, we have avoided substantial capital expenditures, improved server roll-out time from weeks to days, and can add new services and applications without increasing headcount or reducing reliability."
Challenge:
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Allianz Global Investors is a critical financial services partner for its clients, managing over $690 billion U.S. for clients globally.
- Allianz Global Investors’ U.S. IT team was tasked with increasing the department’s efficiency and productivity, while improving performance and reliability.
Solution:
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After examining numerous options, Allianz Global Investors implemented a server virtualization strategy and realized the AMD Opteron™ processor could provide outstanding memory and performance within that environment.
- To implement this strategy, Allianz Global Investors began to shift many functions to AMD Opteron processor-based HP ProLiant® BL25p blade servers running VMware® virtual infrastructure software.
Impact:
Currently, Allianz has virtualized almost half its servers using VMware, hosting 190 physical servers and 160 virtual sessions, enabling them to:
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- Add significant services without increasing head count;
- Better support a workforce scattered across multiple sites with minimal loss of performance or reliability;
- Deliver new systems in days versus weeks, applying the resulting IT productivity to other value-added areas within the division; and
- Lay the groundwork for future company growth and expansion with minimum service interruptions.
Organizational Profile
Allianz Global Investors is a top 10 global asset management firm that provides access to the specialized equity and fixed-income expertise of its affiliated institutional investment firms. These firms manage more than $691.9 billion and have a client list that includes more than half of the 100 largest corporations in the United States. The group’s range of investment products includes mutual funds, exchange-traded closed-end funds and managed accounts.
Allianz Global Investors is a member of the Allianz Group (NYSE: AZ), a global financial services leader with a 112-year corporate history and a presence in more than 70 countries. With 5,000 employees worldwide, Allianz Global Investors’ 2,000 U.S. employees are spread across five major offices in New York, NY; Stamford, Conn.; Dallas, TX; San Diego, CA; and Newport Beach, CA.
Challenge
Allianz Global Investors’ core business is information. The Allianz IT team is tasked with deploying the right technology—with computing speed and reliability top priorities—to deliver that information to employees, in order to position the company as the best possible financial services partner for its customers. Specifically, the firm’s portfolio managers and traders must be able to access up-to-date market information, and execute trades in real-time with 100 percent guaranteed reliability.
“Our systems simply cannot crash, resulting in customers missing major investment opportunities—it is not an option,” said Global Allianz Investors Senior Vice President for Technology Kevin Dillon. Other compute-intensive practices must also be supported by the technology team such as financial modeling, which evaluates all components of a transaction in order to minimize risk. Applications like financial modeling require significant computational resources as they calculate numerous variables such as interest rates and price of securities to run quantitative analyses on simulated portfolios.
Dillon and his team are responsible for the back-end infrastructure for many of Allianz Global Investors’ U.S. operating entities, which include data centers, servers, data, telecommunications and network communications. Though the company has data centers dispersed in five different locations in North America, IT management is centralized to ensure consistency in critical technology and business processes, especially concerning regulatory compliance issues such as e-mail retention, data classification and encryption practices, as well as service development and deployment.
When it comes to technology decisions, the Allianz Global Investors IT team has earned a reputation for being a sophisticated early adopter, taking the same risk-versus-return approach that has made the company as a whole so successful.
“Our goal is to solve business challenges using innovative technology in a way that will both help the company make money and save money,” Dillon says. “This approach gives Allianz Global Investors the opportunity to make decisions about what are the right services for the overall health of the business versus just one-off decisions.”
He added, “At the end of the year, if we want to lower our IT spending, we know exactly how to do that and can pinpoint resource-hogging applications that ultimately may be costing the company more money than they’re enabling.”
As part of its ongoing effort to identify and implement innovative, financially responsible technologies, Dillon and his team began scrutinizing innovations such as service-oriented architectures (SOA), virtualization and grid computing to see which could bring value to the company.
“We had to not only define our strategy, but also to separate fact from fiction: determine which technologies could actually deliver on their promises,” Dillon said.
Solution
After exploring their options, Dillon and his team determined virtualization was the best solution for Allianz Global Investors. Virtualization would allow Allianz to average 15 to 25 virtual servers on a single physical server, avoiding significant capital expenditures. In addition, virtual servers could be delivered in days instead of weeks and could be “shipped” to sites via the company’s network.
For disaster recovery purposes, servers could be kept up-to-date and deployed over the network. Since minimal network configuration would be required for its virtual servers, data center cabling and trouble-shooting expenses could be reduced. And, since few physical servers would be needed, Allianz expected a reduction in heat load and power consumption.
Initially, Dillon and his team tested the virtualization waters on so-called “orphan applications”, lightly used software that was not critical to day-to-day business operations. This allowed testing to be completed in a risk-free manner.
AMD Opteron™ processors helped to speed implementations and enhance software performance. “It appears to me that the AMD memory interface is outstanding. Putting performance improvements into chips is still a little bit of a black art, but AMD appears to have streamlined the pipelines or channels that connect software to hardware,” said Dillon.
Dillon also stated that AMD was forthright in sharing its long-term product strategy, ensuring Allianz Global Investors it would continue to innovate and help the company better plan for future IT architecture refreshes.
Impact
Allianz Global Investors virtualized half its servers using VMware and AMD, hosting 190 physical servers and 160 virtual sessions. This has enabled Allianz Global Investors to reduce capital expenditures and make the IT team more efficient.
“I’ve used both AMD and competitive processors for years, and, in my experience, AMD seems to come out ahead for performance and reliability,” Dillon said, basing his opinion on anecdotal tests run within Allianz Global Investors’ IT environment. “Since implementing the AMD Opteron processor-based virtualization solution, we have avoided substantial capital expenditures, improved server roll-out time from weeks to days, and can add new services and applications without increasing headcount or reducing reliability.”
Averaging 15-25 virtual servers on a single physical server, Dillon elaborated on the costs savings by stating, “Using AMD for virtualization we have been able to install fewer machines which translates into lower heat load, fewer racks, fewer network connections—all of these things help save on capital and operational expenses for the company.”
Additionally, the company can introduce new services without increasing head count. “We’re doing more than we were without having to add people, and it’s enabled the people who are here to focus on more value-added initiatives that put new ideas into action,” Dillon said. The company expects its virtual server percentage to increase to 80 percent by mid 2008.
The new system is also helping the Allianz Global Investors IT team address its geography challenges with exceptional efficiency. With five separate U.S. offices and a centralized IT backbone, Allianz Global Investors virtualized applications across multiple sites with minimal loss of performance or reliability. Additionally, new virtualized servers can be deployed quickly and easily via the company’s network anywhere in the world.
Consolidation on one hardware platform has also positioned Allianz Global Investors well for future fund acquisitions. “We will be able to virtualize and integrate virtually any application, laying the groundwork for future company growth and expansion with minimal service interruptions,” Dillon says. “That supports our goal of delivering high performance and reliability, no matter what new companies join our corporate family.”
AMD figures prominently in Allianz Global Investors’ ongoing and future plans. The company is planning to move to VMware’s ESX Server 3 to leverage disk resources of the SAN via Internet SCSI (iSCSI), a network protocol—all of which will be implemented on AMD technology. By sharing its product roadmap, AMD is helping Allianz Global Investors architect for today and tomorrow.
“Since implementing the AMD Opteron processor-based virtualization solution, we have avoided substantial capital expenditures, improved server roll-out time from weeks to days, and can add new services and applications without increasing headcount or reducing reliability.”—Kevin Dillon, senior vice president for technology, Allianz Global Investors
About AMD
Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is a leading global provider of innovative processing solutions in the computing, graphics and consumer electronics markets. AMD is dedicated to driving open innovation, choice and industry growth by delivering superior customer-centric solutions that empower consumers and businesses worldwide. For more information, visit www.amd.com.
© 2007 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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