HP Signed With Commercial Bank of Africa

Commercial Bank of Africa Ltd and HP
Kenya signed a converged infrastructure project solution valued at
Kshs 65 million (US $800,000) in support of the banks regional expansion.

The solution known as HP 3PAR Storage System will provide additional storage
capacity of 50TB to meet the banks projected customer demand in 2013 to 2015.

The project deployment will see HP
implement the 3PAR Utility Storage across the CBA HQs in Upperhill and
branches regionally. The scalability aspect of the utility storage system
allows feature optimization where the bank will setup only what is required and
scale up as the business grows; hence ensuring maximum optimisation The contract
signed by Charles Kuria, MD HP East Africa and Jeremy Ngunze, CEO-CBA Kenya,
will allow the Bank to be more efficient and enable it comply with regulatory
demands for the long term retention of data.

Speaking during the signing of the
converged infrastructure project, Ngunze said: "The system is offering a highly efficient
solution to storage system performance as it enables CBA comply with regulatory
demands for long term retention of data without impacting the service
performance."

The project also marks a shift
to a new eco-friendly system for CBA Group. Speaking during the contract
signing ceremony HP East Africa MD, Kuria indicated that this has been
necessitated by the need to address the ever evolving needs of today’s virtual
and cloud data centres.

"More
and more companies are asking that the IT infrastructure implemented in their
data centres balances both efficiency and the need for long-term environmental
sustainability. The HP 3PAR servers are designed to address these expectations,"
said Kuria.

The 3PAR Storage is designed to consolidate hundreds or thousands of VMs on a single
storage system thus allowing enterprises to meet their business needs with at
least 50% less capacity. With fewer disks to power and cool,
less equipment to house, and less hardware to down cycle at end of life, 3PAR Storage is a foundation for energy-efficient data initiatives.

Kuria added: "Our clients tell us their journey to the cloud will be one of the most
critical transitions for them this decade, and the HP 3PAR Utility Storage
meets their demand for a new storage architecture specifically designed for IT
as a Service. HP is poised to take clients to new levels of agility and
efficiency like they’ve never experienced before."

Through this system, CBA will set up and
grow storage 41% times faster while reducing administration time by up to 90%.

"The
monetary value of the investment far surpasses the benefits that the storage
system will provide. Our data center will be simpler, more secure, more
flexible, more efficient and less expensive to operate; thanks to a
consolidated system that is a convergence of server, storage and networking – a
management tool that has integrated security in its operations", added Ngunze.

The new storage offerings will optimize
cloud service delivery and simplify data management for CBA.

Delivering
utility-based storage resources for the cloud growing adoption of both public
and private clouds has forced IT organizations and service providers to rethink
their infrastructure design. Achieving the agility and performance demanded by
cloud services requires the integration of computing, storage and networking, as
well as centralized management.