Australian Finance Group

Australian Finance Group Brokers A Deal With Sun for IT Infrastructure Refresh

AFG One Of First Australian Organisations To Realise Performance And Costs Savings Of Breakthrough T2000 Server

As Australia's largest mortgage broker, Australian Finance Group (AFG) currently has a mortgage customer book of more than $34 billion worth of mortgage finance. The West Australia-based firm has more than 3,000 brokers, processing between 7,000 and 8,500 residential mortgages each month and running 300,000 individual transactions every day.

AFG's brokers - and the company's bottom line - rely on one core business application, the Flex Mortgage Broking System. So when the number of mortgage brokers using the system increased and the system began to slow down earlier this year, IT infrastructure manager Paul Blackman knew that an upgrade was critical. Also, it was apparent that the upgrade needed to do more than increase performance.

After thorough consideration of a number of vendors, Blackman chose Sun to provide a solution that would increase performance but also reduce costs and simplify administration through consolidation.

Consolidation With The T2000

The company planned to move data centres and wanted to start over with a system that was easy to manage and would scale for future growth. The old systems would then be used to power AFG's disaster recovery centre.

"We had a number of servers behind the Flex System, each processing individual jobs, and the infrastructure had become a nightmare to manage from a technical point of view," said Blackman. "It was also costing us a considerable amount of money in software licensing fees given that each disparate server required an Oracle Database license."

Three Sun Fire T2000s coupled with the Solaris 10 Operating System provided the optimal consolidation solution for AFG.

The T2000, based on the UltraSPARC T1 processor with Coolthreads technology, offers triple the throughput of competitive offerings while consuming half the power and half the size.

Utilising the server's multi-threading power as well as Solaris Containers has enabled AFG to run six separate environments on a single server.

These UltraSPARC T1-based servers host the Oracle database while two Sun Fire v490s host the Flex Mortgage Broking application. AFG also purchased a number of Sun Fire v210s which are used in a multitude of roles, including web servers, backup servers and development and test boxes.

Immediate ROI

The T2000s have also significantly reduced AFG's power and cooling costs. And with a 50 per cent increase in system performance, the company will continue to reap the financial benefits of increased productivity for both staff and customers.

A Seamless Upgrade

AFG had a tight timetable for the infrastructure refresh. The ability to create new environments within the T2000 with Solaris Containers allowed the company to migrate applications and implement new projects quickly and without any downtime.

"The level of support we received from Sun together with the capabilities of the systems and software they provided made the upgrade quick and painless," said Blackman.

Sun will continue to provide ongoing service support to AFG for the next three years to ensure business continuity. AFG is confident that the solution in place will provide the performance and scalability it needs through out that time.