Despite those concerns, Higgins says, management is "clearly not giving IT an open checkbook. A lot of IT individuals are saying, 'how can I improve where I was and, at the same time, do that with less money?'" By moving straight to disk, he says, firms are lowering their costs.
The more critical the information or application, the more a firm spends to protect it. So a firm that has a legal obligation to close out trades and report to clients and authorities would run that reporting system on a synchronous-recovery solution, while a corporate-purchasing program that simply buys pencils and papers runs in an asynchronous mode. Firms need to "balance cost versus compliance."
He says firms can't avoid having more than one site available to them, but there are ways to reduce hardware costs, especially if a firm opts to handle its own secondary site.
EMC recently purchased VMWare, Inc. a Palo Alto, Calif., software company that specializes in Intel-based virtual-computing software. It allows firms to use Intel-based servers and run multiple operating systems across them. As a result, financial-services firms can run a Microsoft and a UNIX application on the same server. Typically, he says, firms group servers to run applications across one business line. They will now be able to run applications across many business lines, cutting their server ratio in half. "It has huge implications for costs." He adds that it will help reduce spending and simplify operations.
For firms that want that little extra protection, they might want to mix refurbished equipment into the equation to reduce costs. Gulfcoast Workstation Corp., a Florida-based subsidiary of Relational Funding Corporation, reports that it helped a large integrated financial institution build a ghost site that parallels the firm's main site. In the event of a denial of service attack, blackout or similar disaster, the ghost site picks up the applications in real time. The site runs on refurbished gear, including an IBM AS/400 that cost $36,000 compared to $100,000 brand new. Gulfcoast estimates that it reduced the firm's costs by 10 to 12 percent over a 36-month lease of the equipment.
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