Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort is relocating its London Docklands datacentre in a multimillion-pound project that will see a complete revamp of hardware, software and management processes.

From September, 2,000 Windows, Solaris and Linux servers will be moved to a new site in Watford which will house the bank’s second-largest European datacentre.
City-based companies are increasingly examining their datacentre locations amid concerns over energy assurance and costs.

“Rising energy bills certainly influenced our plans. There is a shortage of power and we have planned the new datacentre so it is not only efficient, but resilient when it comes to power consumption,” said John Bratkovics, Dresdner Kleinwort’s global head of networks, voice and collaboration technologies.

“You have to prepare for the unexpected and build in time buffers for things that do not necessarily come to mind, typically issues outside the technology realm, such as power supply,” he said.

Bratkovics said the move suffered from a delay in the supply of electricity.

“Electricity delivery is critical when putting together a facility that supports an investment bank and we had anticipated that power would be delivered slightly earlier than expected, so we had to work around that,” he said.

Dresdner’s current IT set-up is more than seven years old and has expanded through equipment acquisition and in-house application development.

The bank used an automated discovery system from Tideway to assess its existing infrastructure, cross-referencing the data with existing manual inventories and reports.

“Relocating a datacentre is a very resource-intensive exercise, with the co-ordination of the logistics behind it being the trickiest part,” said Bratkovics.

“Upfront work in identifying equipment within the site, as well as communicating what has been moved, was essential.”

The move has been planned for almost two years.