The Skipton is the 7th largest UK Building Society and are one of the nation's leading financial services providers with assets of over £6 billion. To date, the Skipton has 80 branches from Aberdeen to Plymouth. Their aim is to offer customers the very highest standards of service.

Skipton Building Society has been using our RG Solutions products for Capacity Management of their Core systems since 1992. During this time, Skipton has upgraded its systems through 3 generations of Unisys mainframe technology and last year has moved this to a Microsoft Windows solution on Unisys ES7000 systems.

For each of these changes, Skipton has used RG Solutions to ensure that its systems deliver the levels of service required to support their business, whilst ensuring that IT expenditure is minimised.

Skipton use the reporting capabilities of RG Solutions to ensure that service levels are maintained and that there is sufficient capacity available for increases in work volumes and new services.

Using the advanced workload analysis feature of RG Solutions, Skipton have been able to accurately cost the IT usage of the different aspects of the business.

Their recent move from the Unisys mainframe systems to Windows based Unisys servers has been a major achievement for the Society. During this move, Skipton used RG Solutions to plan and monitor their core systems migration. RG Solutions was used throughout the transition period, regardless of hardware platform, to ensure that service levels would be met. These systems were deployed to all 80 branches in just 30 days. During the rollout, RG Solutions was used to track the number of workstations against the performance of the systems to ensure that no overloads were likely to occur. On an ongoing basis, RG Solutions is used for monthly performance and capacity reviews.

In addition to the transition from mainframe to Windows, Skipton have also used RG Solutions for their Server Consolidation exercise. Again, this ensured that service levels were maintained as workloads from individual servers were added to the ES7000 Windows servers.

In addition to using RG Solutions to manage their IT systems, Skipton also make extensive use of the RG Solutions data base of long term capacity information.

They periodically use the unique dynamic summarisation technique to review long term capacity trends. Having this information ensures that they have sufficient processor, memory and disk resources available for contingency purposes.

Using the detailed drill-down capabilities, Skipton have been able to investigate disk bottlenecks, application issues, new software release changes, transaction response times and overnight batch turnaround times.

They tested various databases and systems prior to moving to Unisys ES7000 systems with JADE applications and databases. JADE is an advanced technology platform; purpose built for the development and deployment of large transaction processing software systems. JADE has an integrated application development environment, it’s own language, an object-manager and a high performance object-orientated database.

The 80 branch rollout was handled on 2 ES7000’s for thin clients in the branches. Following this, the core databases were hosted on a further 2 ES7000’s.

Following the migration, the transaction logs produced by JADE were integrated into RG Solutions with the Windows performance data, giving an ability to predict how the systems will perform against anticipated transaction growth.

Using RG Solutions, Skipton also have the ability to review the SQL and Exchange Server performance information.