GBM completes IT - DR infrastructure upgrade for GPS

Commenting on the alliance, Abdulla Ishaq, Country General Manager for Bahrain Business Machines (BBM) - the Bahrain Operation of GBM - said, "With this upgrade and the creation of the disaster recovery site, our objective was to provide GPS with an advanced and smarter IT environment, which in turn will allow GPS to provide additional value to their corporate customers."

"With the increase in energy costs and power density of new electronics, power-efficient devices are becoming progressively more important. GBM together with IBM are committed to helping clients achieve greater efficiency in their operations by deploying solutions that can highly optimize their IT and hence reduce costs. We are excited about this partnership and look forward to nurturing a lasting business relationship with GPS," Ishaq added.

Ali Arab, Acting General Manager at GPS said, "We share a long and excellent relationship with GBM for their track record as a reliable and committed partner. They have constantly provided GPS with added stability and timely support needed for enhancement initiatives in customer service quality."

"With more organizations and government agencies pushing and promoting e-Payment, GPS is expected to continue to grow aggressively. This latest venture will definitely improve GPS' processing capability and provide us with capacity to accommodate the anticipated growth and to establish GPS Disaster Recovery Site as part of compliance requirements of the Bahrain Central Bank (CBB) with regards to business continuity," Mr. Arab added.

Starting March 2005, GPS has undertaken the complete processing of CrediMax, the largest credit card issuer and Point of Sale acquirer in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Ever since, GPS has started processing for five regional banks. GPS EMV Personalization Centre has been certified by Visa and MasterCard.

The upgrade for GPS consisted of enhancing the Production site infrastructure with a new System p server. This new server will be a POWER6 processor based IBM Model p550. This boost is expected to elevate GPS' existing performance by approximately 60%.

The fastest microprocessor ever built, POWER6 contains many technological breakthroughs that provide twice the performance with virtually no increase in energy consumption. POWER6 processors continue to display their versatility in performance benchmark results. It demonstrates IBM's continued commitment to organizations of all sizes.

The exceptional price/performance, breadth of available applications, reliability, availability, serviceability (RAS) characteristics; energy efficiency; flexibility and leadership virtualization capabilities of the IBM System p 550 Express server makes it a highly desirable platform for organisations of any size.

Clients can realise the innovation of POWER6 processors and virtualization technologies with the p550 Express server and obtain significant benefits for application and database serving or x86 Linux consolidation. As a consolidation server, it is designed to provide superior availability and efficiency while reducing infrastructure costs.