Suffolk Life and IBM work together to Reduce Power and Save Money

Smarter Computing and streamlined storage delivers improved flexibility and business agility

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Jul 12, 2012, 03:00 ET

LONDON, July 12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Suffolk Life, one of the U.K.'s leading providers and administrators of specialist pensions, has decreased energy consumption while meeting increased customer demand after adopting IBM's Smarter Computing approach to IT several months ago. In the four weeks following completion of the project in April, overall power consumption at Suffolk Life had reduced by 37 percent, delivering projected savings of approximately 30k pounds Sterling per year.

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Suffolk Life is one of the U.K.'s leading providers and administrators of Self Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs), administering more than 16,000 self-invested plans with gross assets in excess of 4.5 billion pounds Sterling. IBM's Smarter Computing approach to IT is designed to provide customers greater system efficiencies and performance, while lowering costs, through the use of optimized systems. In the case of Suffolk Life, the company is now able to quickly increase infrastructure based on consumer and business demand while lowering energy consumption.

IBM upgraded and consolidated the Suffolk Life IT server and storage infrastructure to deliver increased flexibility in handling and accessing pension data across the business while significantly decreasing their carbon footprint and energy costs. The improvements also allow for easy expansion as their customer database grows.

"We are continually looking to find new ways of improving our business processes and infrastructure in order to deliver top class propositions and services for our customers," said Ian Long, Head of Information Technology for Suffolk Life. "This project has been a resounding success for Suffolk Life. IBM delivered an updated infrastructure ahead of schedule that enabled us to significantly reduce our power consumption and associated running costs."

IBM migrated 84 percent of the existing physical environment to a new virtualized server and storage environment, switching from HP servers to energy efficient IBM System x3650 M3 servers. As a result, Suffolk Life has consolidated the physical servers from 66 boxes to only six across two sites, plus the additional nine IBM hosts providing the new virtual environment. As well as providing a new server and storage infrastructure, the project included the migration of 60 business applications to the new environment.

"IBM has been able to apply our services expertise to provide Suffolk Life the IT flexibility needed to keep up with increased customer demand and provide the foundation of flexibility, efficiency and capacity to significantly grow the business into the future," said Andrew Brierley, Vice President of Integrated Technology Services, IBM U.K. & Ireland.

As a result of the project, data indicates that overall power consumption at Suffolk Life has reduced by approximately 37 percent since the implementation of the new infrastructure with a potential cost saving per year of up to 30k pounds Sterling. The power reduction seen during the first 4 weeks of running the new environment equates to almost 13 tons of C0² (12,888kg).

The System x3650 server is part of IBM's Smarter Computing initiative. Through cloud technologies and systems optimized for their specific workload, IBM is helping organisations better access, organize, and utilize their own large amounts of data.

About Suffolk Life
Suffolk Life is one of the UK's leading providers and administrators of specialist pension products, primarily Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs). It has total assets exceeding 4 billion pounds Sterling. Suffolk Life owns over 2,500 properties for over 4,000 SIPP investors. All figures are as at January 2012. Suffolk Life is part of the Legal & General Group. Established in 1971 and based in Ipswich, Suffolk Life employs around 200 people and has built an enviable reputation based on its expertise and knowledge of the SIPP market.

About IBM
For more information about IBM, please visit www.ibm.com/uk/services

Contact
IBM
Kate McElwee, UK External Relations
+44 (0)7725 201076
[email protected]

Darcy Hansen, US External Relations
917- 472-3692
[email protected]

Suffolk Life
Greg Kingston, Head of Marketing
+44(0)1473 296793

SOURCE IBM