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There is no room for downtime at premier investment firm Morgan Keegan & Company. Individual investors, corporate and institutional clients rely on the nationally recognized firm to deliver a full range of investment banking, securities brokerage, wealth and asset management services across the U.S.
To maintain its reputation for quality research and timely financial advice, Morgan Keegan analysts and brokers must have round-the-clock access to data, from external news and market feeds, and to internal financial and customer management systems. And, they need lightningfast connectivity whether they’re next door to one of Morgan Keegan’s two data centers, or hundreds of miles away in one of the firm’s 400 branch offices.
Raritan products have been helping the firm deliver high levels of uptime in their two data centers. However, supporting their remote branch office sites was becoming a larger task.
Based on the stellar performance of Raritan’s remote management products in its data centers, Morgan Keegan chose Raritan’s new Dominion® KSX II, its next-generation appliance that delivers secure always-available access to the diverse IT equipment located at branch offices. Not only would the Dominion KSX II sharply reduce the time required resolving support issues, it would enable the existing Morgan Keegan IT staff to handle the newly added branch offices.
Maintaining Visibility
More than 3,200 Morgan Keegan employees in 19 states rely on its data centers and network infrastructure to operate efficiently. The firm’s 118 IT employees operate two data centers in Tennessee: one, a primary hot site; and the other, a business continuity site — where the staff of about 20 are ready to assume operations should the first site experience a downtime event.
To monitor every piece of equipment at those data centers, Morgan Keegan uses Raritan’s CommandCenter® Secure Gateway, which provides an aggregated view of all IT equipment connected to Raritan KVM-over-IP switches on a single screen. The Secure Gateway — conveniently accessed from anywhere, using one IP address — also provides user authentication, and enables IT administrators to initiate access to target servers through the most appropriate means, including KVM over IP, serial console, DRAC 4, and iLO/iLO2.
Integrated with CommandCenter Secure Gateway are Raritan’s 64-port Dominion KX and Dominion KX II KVM-over-IP switches, which provide multiple concurrent users with secure, BIOS-level control of servers and other IT devices from a single keyboard/video/mouse console. “With a simple click of an icon on the screen, we can access any server no matter where it is located,” says Don Meyers, Senior Vice President, Corporate Information Security & Core Services Manager at Morgan Keegan & Co., Inc., who leads both the IT and physical security departments for the firm. “Our authentication, through CommandCenter Gateway, enables my staff to quickly get to the servers that they are assigned to administer.”
Remote Support Challenges
But Morgan Keegan was experiencing issues in supporting far-flung branches. Ninety of those offices operate a large range of IT equipment, including at least two servers, a Reuters server for financial feeds, recording PCs for phone logs, and PBX or IP phone systems, as well as desktops.
When a branch office experienced a performance event, Morgan Keegan had addressed the issue via a remote software support solution. But, that had proved time-consuming and problematic.
“Sometimes if we tried a reboot and the system would hang, we would call the branch and have to have the office manager go in and perform or initiate a hard reset,” says Meyers. In addition, consuming network bandwidth to perform support “could cause a slower response time across the WAN,” he adds. “It could degrade performance, and the Morgan Keegan client would see that it was taking longer than usual to get information.”
The IT staff also had to limit server maintenance and reboots to times when a resource was available in the office to physically reset systems in the event of a problem. Plus, the server’s operating system had to be running in order for the remote software solution to work. If the OS had crashed after hours there was no way to access the server — short of traveling to the branch office.
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