BHN

Overview – BHN transforms cloud sustainability with Meridian IT

To process more than 98 million transactions per year, BHN relies on the performance and reliability of IBM Power servers running in the Meridian IT Private Cloud. With energy costs skyrocketing, the company decided to migrate to latest-generation IBM Power and Storage infrastructure to increase energy efficiency and boost sustainability.

Business Challenge

As a leader in global branded payment technologies, BHN strengthens relationships between brands and their customers by transforming transactions into connections. Its products include gift cards, rewards and incentives, employee benefits and payments, and its clients include some of the UK’s biggest and most prestigious brands. IBM Power sits at the heart of BHN’s technology stack, running a business-critical application that currently processes more than 98 million transactions for clients per year. The workload involves processing hundreds of thousands of very large files, averaging more than a million records per file, and the application contains more than 500,000 lines of code. Nine years ago, BHN realized that it could increase flexibility and reduce costs by replacing its on-premise IBM Power infrastructure with a cloud solution, and became one of the earliest companies to move into the Meridian IT Private Cloud. This not only enabled a shift in IT costs from CAPEX to OPEX, but also enabled the company to take advantage of Meridian’s world-class expertise in IBM Power and IBM i, instead of maintaining a large team of experts in-house. However, in the early 2020s, BHN was embarking on a major initiative to reduce its carbon footprint, and the energy efficiency of its IT systems became a key concern. At the same time, a perfect storm of natural, economic and geopolitical events caused energy prices in the UK to skyrocket. A 635% rise in energy costs for data centre providers posed the risk of significant cost increases for their end customers too. Seeking to minimise both the financial and environmental impact of its cloud infrastructure, BHN turned to Meridian to help find a more sustainable solution.

Solution

At the time, BHN’s applications were running on IBM POWER9 processor-based servers, but Meridian had recently built a new private cloud based on latest generation IBM Power10 technology. “I’ve literally called Meridian at 2am, and they’ve answered the phone and solved my problem straight away. That’s a level of service you just don’t get from other providers.” Arun Anand, Snr. Engineering Manager, BHN “The Power10 architecture is much more energy efficient for the same workload,” explains Arun Anand, at BHN. “Meridian advised us that by migrating to Power10, we could marginalise the increase in our cloud infrastructure costs and improve sustainability, while gaining access to new features.” To make the migration viable, it had to be seamless. BHN’s business has a very limited tolerance for downtime, so the window for moving its data to two new data centres and getting its systems back up and running would be tight. At the same time, it was vital to ensure there would be no impact on stability or performance, and no disruption for business users. “Meridian helped us plan the migration really carefully,” says Arun Anand. “We did a lot of testing to ensure we could estimate the required outage window accurately. We performed the migration over a weekend, and although there are always some gotchas on the night, we were well prepared. We got everything back online in time for our users arriving on Monday morning, we had no processing issues, and nobody even noticed the change. That’s what you want from a migration!” Today, BHN benefits from all the state-of-the art features of Meridian’s Power10 private cloud infrastructure. For example, it uses IBM Full System FlashCopy for snapshot-based backups, which means there is no impact on production workloads during the backup process. BHN also takes advantage of Meridian’s SAN-level replication capabilities, so if a drive fails in its primary storage system, it can fail over to a replica at its disaster recovery site in a matter of minutes.

Customer Benefits

With Meridian’s new Power10 private cloud architecture, BHN’s servers use 41% less energy to run the same workloads. This almost entirely offsets the increase in UK energy pricing and has enabled BHN to keep its cloud costs stable, avoiding a potential increase of around 25%. At the same time, the new platform provides significant headroom in processing and storage capacity as BHN’s business continues to grow. The move also aligns with BHN’s broader initiatives around carbon neutrality and net zero emissions. “As a business, we’re not just box-ticking where sustainability is concerned,” says Arun Anand. “We’ve already met our targets for shifting to sustainable card and packaging materials, and we’re increasingly encouraging our clients to use digital wallets instead of physical gift cards. In Meridian, we’ve found a partner that shares our values—the fact that they take sustainability so seriously is a major reason why we work with them.” The other major reason is stellar service. Arun Anand recalls: “Meridian’s technical expertise is second to none, and they are always there for us when we need them. I’ve literally called Meridian at 2am, and they’ve answered the phone and solved my problem straight away. That’s a level of service you just don’t get from other providers.” He concludes: “As a business, we try to be a true partner to our clients, not just a supplier. We aim to grow with them, so their success is our success. With Meridian, we feel like we have that same type of relationship. We’ve grown and matured together during our shared cloud journey.”