Ersel

A benchmark company in asset management, Ersel has decided to exploit the power of the Colt network to support its business, ensuring its services and applications are constantly available to its clients. The new network infrastructure provides high-performance connectivity to allow Ersel’s employees to concentrate on their professional activities without worrying about business continuity.

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Who they are

Ersel (www.ersel.it) specialises in asset management and consultancy on tax and investment issues, in addition to corporate advisory services. The company stands tall amongst its competitors due to the high quality support it provides, the personalisation of its service and the relationship of trust it builds with its clients. With over 80 years’ experience in the business, Ersel is an independent organisation that can offer its clients numerous asset investment opportunities through mutual funds, closed-end funds and hedge funds. Ersel manages assets worth more than 13 billion euros through a workforce of more than 200 employees operating from three branches in Italy (Turin, Milan and Bologna), and two in Luxembourg and London.

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The challenge

Ersel is a dynamic firm enjoying growth in Italy and abroad and constantly broadening the range of its activities. This has led to a significant increase in its requirements for connectivity. With the IT department playing an increasingly important role in Ersel’s business, they saw that the primary requirement was to improve technical performance by modernising the suite of hardware. The aim was to rebuild the network architecture to support the company’s growth with a network able to respond efficiently to current and future bandwidth requirements, ensure superior performance and provide more fluid, efficient support to all the business activities.

Another important requirement was to guarantee Ersel’s clients absolute security and continuity of service, a crucial aspect for those operating in capital markets. Any interruption of service or unavailability of these systems would be seriously detrimental to Ersel’s business. A technical problem would not only prevent employees from accessing the tools of their trade but would also impact clients, who would be unable to access documents in the dedicated online area. In addition to this, there would be damage to the company’s reputation, a critical factor in a market where trust is a fundamental asset.

Ersel’s managers therefore decided to introduce a new, more dynamic and reliable disaster recovery system involving duplication of the main data centre in Turin. This required independent network connections from any point on the network to both data centres (previously, the system only provided connections to the Turin office).

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The solution

To meet these needs, Ersel turned to Colt and Bellucci (retailer, system integrator and Colt sales network franchisee), who worked together to define the technical requirements and handle the project’s implementation.

“We decided to redesign the entire layout of our network, incorporating a second data centre, located in Milan,” said Enrico Asinelli, Ersel’s Systems and Infrastructures Technical Office Manager.

“The contents of the new data centre are perfectly aligned with the Turin centre through a redundant connection with ultra-high speed differentiated routing and a capacity of 1 Gbps to ensure optimal, resilient performance. The new network architecture doubles the data centre and ensures the redundancy of all the nodes, in other words, it is an entire geographical Ethernet network with international reach, exclusively on fibre optics supplying bandwidth capacity to each individual office of 50 –bps to 1 Gbps. It guarantees the option of rerouting the data and creating alternative pathways to get around any problems, safeguarding the operation of the systems and so the entire business.”

The redundancy and resilience of the Colt Ethernet network, confirmed by MEF CE 2.0 certification, made it possible to offer Ersel extremely high Service Level Agreements that lay down service availability equal to or higher than 99.9%. In addition, on the specific request of Ersel, the agreement envisaged a proactive network monitoring service provided directly by Colt’s franchisee Bellucci. Thanks to this new high-performance and more secure layout and the creation of a new data centre, Ersel is ready to face tomorrow’s business challenges. “The main benefits of the current infrastructure are the extremely highperformance bandwidth capacity and a much more effective disaster recovery process than the previous one, ensuring business continuity, something of great importance for those engaged in financial investment,” said Paolo Valente, Ersel’s Planning, Organisation and Systems Director. “The new network and data processing infrastructure will allow us to anticipate any new developments in the field of Disaster Recovery and business continuity, highly relevant to investment companies like Ersel, bringing us into line with the current position of the banking institutions.”

“We are delighted to work on such important projects together with an organisation like Colt,” said Alberto Bellucci, Managing Director of Bellucci. “The solution developed with Ersel is an example of how Colt technologies can meet diverse needs in an organic way, especially in projects developed with clients and partners. As always, the evidence of the reliability of Colt’s solutions lies in the Service Level Agreements, very strictly defined and calibrated to meet the specific requirements of a major client like Ersel.”