MSI Systems Integrators

Farm Credit Services of America had a big IT problem: Its 120 servers were operating above capacity. The heat from the data center alone was causing systems to crash. And the complexity was monstrous, requiring several weeks of configuration for every upgrade. In short, it was a nightmare for the Omaha, Neb., bank, which relies on the Internet for loan origination--a business growing at 12.5 percent annually.

But, with a combination of brains and bronze, MSI Systems Integrators cleaned up the problem and built a more efficient infrastructure. The result was a more than 10 percent decrease in operating costs and capacity to increase business more than 10 percent. Little wonder why MSI won VARBusiness' VAR of the Year award for Customer Return on Investment.

MSI, also in Omaha, attacked the problem with IBM's Consolidation, Discovery and Analysis Tool (CDAT) to see whether a system reconfiguration could use resources more efficiently and simplify management. "A CDAT analysis allows us to see how much a server's hardware resources--including the processor, memory and disk space--are actually being utilized in a server farm," says Mark Pelan, MSI's Intel specialist.

As is the case with many companies, Farm Credit was wasting 85 percent to 90 percent of it computing power. Using the CDAT analysis as a road map, MSI recommended a $120,000 virtualization solution using VMWare ESX to build virtual servers out of an IBM Blade Server farm. Then MSI helped Farm Credit duplicate the installation at another site, so the client now has a fully redundant system built on virtual servers. In the unlikely event of a server farm failure, the other will pick up and seamlessly take over the company's operations.

The conversion meant significant cost savings. "They had ROI at six months just on avoidance of additional equipment purchases," says Jim Simpson, MSI president and CEO.

One of the best measures of success has been the bank's loan-processing time, which has fallen from days to a blazing-fast four seconds. The result for Farm Credit: a better customer experience and a greater capacity for processing more orders, which means greater growth.

"Anyone with a large Intel server farm is a likely candidate for everything we did for that customer. We've actually done about 20 other projects," Simpson says.

As an IBM Business Partner specializing in RS6000 boxes, MSI has found virtual servers to be an avenue toward continued healthy growth in an age when hardware margins have almost disappeared from sight.