DCM looks at how HBOS decided that it needed a structured cabling solution and how it was implemented

As the UK’s largest mortgage lender, HBOS – now part of Lloyds Banking Group – demands excellence in all areas, not least the optic fibre connectivity solutions that underpin the integrity and security of its data centres. Here is the journey it undertook to deliver exactly that to its customers and the business.

HBOS consists of many banking and insurance brands, such as Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Intelligent Finance, Birmingham Midshires, Esure and Lex Leasing, providing services to in excess of 22 million customers. From the many businesses absorbed, HBOS had implemented a vast array of Fibre Connectivity (FICON) Directors – high-speed input/output (I/O) interfaces for mainframe computer connections to storage devices. To ensure the continuing integrity of its fibre connectivity – and cater for future growth – HBOS urgently needed to refine and rationalise this whole area of its IT infrastructure.

A huge challenge
HBOS employs 66,000 people across the UK, with two main sites in West Yorkshire where its data centres are located. Crucially, it is these data centres, amounting to 4,330m² in total floor space, which support all of the company’s critical banking services. Undertaking and planning the fibre connectivity for such essential areas as mainframe and FICON was to be a vast undertaking.

“The FICON Directors at that time were mostly two generations old, with some more stable than others,” recalls Simon Close, service manager, fibre connectivity services, HBOS. “There were a number of operational problems at that time, such as interruptions to business applications. Also, the existing environment was not as resilient as it might have been and the main concern was that there could have been a failure in one area that then had a serious knock-on effect elsewhere, such as to the ATM network.” To the UK’s largest mortgage lender, which demands excellence in all areas, such a possibility demanded an urgent response.

The timing to renew this environment with the latest technology couldn’t have been better. HBOS was already investing in six new IBM mainframes and 16 FICON Directors, with Brocade Communications Systems’ 4Gb/s 48000 Director technology selected to support the connectivity within and between the two main data centres.

End to end solution
With the new systems in place, the goal was to provide an end-to-end structured fibre cabling solution that would allow the new IBM mainframes to be inter-connected via the 16 FICON Directors to enterprise-class storage devices – and that solution needed to integrate into the overall HBOS Fibre Monitoring Solution. Moreover, HBOS had clear aspirations as it set out on this path, as Close points out: “That we would never need to touch the cabling again was one design objective – to cable once and never revisit it, until fundamental changes were called for.”

HBOS discussed their needs with Splice, with whom they had engaged in the past, to understand if they could accommodate what they were looking for: a solution that was not cost-prohibitive; would scale up to HBOS’ environment; would monitor the fibre optic network to show how things were working – and working well; and one that would prove HBOS’ SLAs [service level agreements] and response times.

All of these are critical factors, especially in a banking environment, and HBOS had to be assured on each of these points. Splice was able to do that – and then the hard work began, with the optical configuration design that HBOS sought emerging from the joint efforts of the two parties. As part of that process, HBOS ensured there was a growth factor built into the total requirement for Splice to ‘cable once’, thus delivering the capability for fast expansion and connectivity in the future.

In all, some 7,000 FICON ports were catered for and managed efficiently within the Splice Optical Distribution Frames (ODFs). Splice installed more than 750 pre-terminated cables, of which the majority were made-to-measure, dedicated for specific equipment ports. In total, this meant providing more than 1,500km of fibre across Singlemode, Multimode OM3 and Multimode 62.5/125, protected within 75km of F-tube cabling, requiring in excess of 13,000 fibre fusion splices.

The scope of the solution and its critical nature demanded it be completely diverse in design. The mainframe connectivity is housed in dedicated ODFs in a strict ‘no touch’ environment, while, through the use of centralised ODFs, HBOS enjoys complete any-to-any port connectivity. This can be achieved without any disruption to the plenum void or within critical racks housing the equipment.

By siting the ODFs against the walls, HBOS was able to use the more valuable central floor space for additional value-add services which meant it achieved a return on its investment after only 9 months.

“From a data centre viewpoint the improvements to air flow, floor space savings and the opportunity to improve our processes by documenting all connections was invaluable," sums up Steve Gee, head of data centre services, service delivery, HBOS.