Leading Risk Manager Boosts Performance

Risk, most analysts will tell you, is a metric. It is not only measurable, but, once pinned down, will open keen insights that can help businesses reinvent themselves, transform, and even grow. If not strategically managed, however, risk can quickly become a disruptive force for the worse.

Even though businesses will have different appetites for risk, their leaders and shareholders will need to intelligently navigate risk varieties of all types to compete in these increasingly uncertain times. The PwC’s Global Risk Survey is an annual report that captures the changing perception of risk. Under the banner of “if we don’t take risks, we don’t progress”, the consulting firm’s annual commentary is nothing else if not a compelling reason why more modern leaders are changing their attitudes toward the broader risk landscape.

But risk is an invisible force if we don’t measure it. At a boardroom level, risk intelligence is as much an artform as it is a science. Imagine designing a business continuity plan without understanding the role of unscripted, natural catastrophes? The global pandemic, in recent memory, was a majorly disruptive event, challenging not only the ways we work, but the stability of our economy. Now apply this to weather forecasting, risk modelling and loss potential, there’s a lot that businesses can learn where risks start to eat into their profitability.

A pioneer in shaping the world’s view of risk, CSI’s client plays a substantial role in the risk management space. After the successful delivery of IBM Storage Scale (or ESS) deployed as appliances into a complex, high performance computing environment, this leading risk management agency opted for a partnership with CSI based on the success of our work on an HPC project with a reputable Formula 1 outfit.

With a complex set of expectations, including precision benchmarking, CSI delivered an HPC compatible solution that, ultimately, offered the client highly performant, scalable data storage for its high-end research computing needs.

The nature of research is data-demanding, where the real onus is on highly-performant, scalable storage that’s in-concert with a wider HPC setting. But beware, when there’s a low ceiling on data growth, storage without foresight will quickly become a headache in years to come.

At a glance, our client wanted to expand their HPC resources with scalable storage that could meet tight performance guarantees. We helped them achieve their ambitions of offering research users a centralised hub of technologies that can be leveraged for their demanding data needs.

Where we excelled:

• Lifted future bottlenecks around storage capacity with a highly scalable solution;
• Delivered an exacting solution to integrate into a highly-performant, benchmarked HPC stack.

 

Performance Guaranteed

Working within the scope of HDR (High Density Rates), CSI worked to very precise benchmarks, ensuring performance guarantees, which satisfied the HPC requirement.

IBM Storage Scale is an enterprise-grade storage solution that offers end-users superior resiliency, scalability, and control. Based on IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS), IBM Storage Scale has been positioned by CSI to deliver scalable capacity and performance gains, which aligns ideally with the goal of overseeing demanding analytics and technically intense workloads.

As the engine for this data-rich project, CSI factored in 1PB growth increments within the view of futureproofed data growth with superior system scalability. In fact, IBM Storage Scale role-models what scalability, for enterprise-grade workloads, can truly look like, where we supplied 2PB of capacity per two boxes installed. Outside of performance guarantees, our decision to choose IBM Storage Scale as storage infrastructure offered very high availability and reliability.

The outcome offered the client a solution that is not only highly-performant, but one that is strongly resilient and cost-optimised, with no single point of failure.

About Our Client

For many decades, our client has developed a reputation as a pioneer in risk analytics and management, helping businesses steer through uncertainties and environmental catastrophes. Whether an extreme weather pattern, a natural crisis, or climate change, our client leverages analytics across different geographies to inform views on risks that have the potential to impact the way businesses operate.