From HSBC’s impressive office tower at Canary Wharf in London, the bank’s ten-strong creative team — part of the marketing and branding department — design and manage around 3,000 items of literature for the bank’s UK organisation. These assets range from terms and conditions of products and services to brochures for specific campaigns, approximately 1,600 of which need to be permanently accessible by the bank’s employees.
The importance of running this part of the organisation on reliable and secure technology is clear: the idea of missing a campaign deadline due to lost or corrupted files is untenable. “We have contingencies in place to manage such situations”, notes departmental head James Sawyer, “but we don’t want to reach that scenario, so it’s great to have Apple technology at the heart of our processes”.
HSBC don’t just use Macs for their design work; since 2003, the department’s server and storage environment has been based on Apple technology. With a single file averaging 500MB, and a project file — comprising work in progress and final designs for single campaigns — weighing in at around 1.5GB, it was clear the department required its own Storage Area Network (SAN) resource, separate from the rest of the bank’s systems. The challenge was to create a network that would improve the department’s workflow while also meeting HSBC’s necessarily stringent disaster recovery standards. When the bank moved to its new building, it was given the perfect opportunity to update its technology infrastructure.
We have been able to move from a system that was running separately from the rest of the network and to its own standards, to something that integrates with the network and provides comparable standards.
In order to achieve their vision, HSBC turned to Viewdata, an Apple Solution Expert for Server and Storage. Apple Solution Experts are independent service providers who specialise in helping businesses large and small purchase, install, learn and support Apple-based solutions. HSBC’s solution is disarmingly simple: a dual processor Xserve attached to a 7TB Xserve RAID sits within the office tower itself, and an identical set-up sits at a secure location off-site. Whatever happens on the system at the office is mirrored on the external resource via a 100Mb link, providing off-site back-up should anything happen to the systems or building in London. As and when circumstances dictate, the technology gives the bank’s employees access to their marketing collateral from any external location.
In addition, both the server and the RAID have been configured to handle system problems or human errors that might interfere with the network. “There are multiple drives, so if anything happens, it will switch to the second drive in the server and continue to work”, explains Paul Scott, technical sales manager at Viewdata. “The RAID has also been split in half so one side will continue to provide data if there’s a problem with the other side”. In the event of a major hardware failure, or the loss of both RAID drives, the second off-site server will deliver data through the same IP address. For Sawyer and his colleagues, this means they will experience unbroken service no matter what happens. And in the event of a major problem, they can recover their work from just one hour ago.
