CASE STUDY: Global Investment Management Firm Rebounds from Disaster

Global Investment Management Firm Rebounds From Disaster with WEI

 

Headquartered in Boston, the financial services firm that reached out to WEI provide investment management for individual and institutional investors in dozens of countries. Since its founding early in the 20th century, the firm has weathered stock market crashes—and most recently, an unusual system crash.

Challenge

The firm’s operations manager experienced the outage first-hand late one Saturday morning when the VPN connection from his home stopped responding. “I verified that my Internet connection was working, then phoned my network manager. He had just received a call from our facilities manager who reported that electricians working on the fire alarm system inadvertently sent the emergency power-down command to our Uninterruptible Power Supply, cutting all power to the data center, dropping everything: servers, storage, network devices—and dropping them hard,” the operations manager recalled.

Notifying his staff to head into the office, he began triaging the damage. While most equipment was able to power up and return to service, 18 of the firm’s first-generation P-class HP blades wouldn’t. A call to the vendor that had sold and maintained the equipment brought frustrating news: they wouldn’t repair any of it because the firm’s contractors caused the damage.

“Electricians sent the emergency power down command to our UPS, cutting all power to the data center, dropping everything: servers, storage,
network devices—and dropping them hard.”
– Operations Manager, Boston investment management firm

Solution

While the equipment was not under a WEI service contract, the firm’s operations manager called WEI’s after-hours service line to say he needed to order new servers first thing Monday morning. “But within an hour, we got word that a WEI P-class certified engineer was on his way with all the spares WEI had in stock.”

Results

“With Worldcom’s help, we prioritized the failures so that the spares let us get all of our business-critical applications back online that day,” the operations manager said. WEI ordered additional replacement parts that Saturday which began arriving Monday. The last of the affected machines were returned to service by Wednesday morning.

“Despite two hundred thousand dollars of server damage, our business users were largely unaffected and core business functions were completely unaffected. Worldcom exceeded every expectation I had by providing parts and personnel on a Saturday—neither of which I expected because we had no service contract in place that required it!”

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