Russell Investment Group

We understand the significant role that technology plays in the investment management business. CGI’s engagement allowed us to provide an environment that is flexible, scalable and reliable to support our future business needs.

John Stingl, Chief Technology Officer, Russell Investment Group

Headquartered in Tacoma, Washington, Russell Investment Group is a global leader in multi-manager investing, offering goal-oriented investors a full range of tailored solutions. With 14 locations around the world, the company advises clients on more than $2.3 trillion in assets and delivers investment programs to more than 1,600 clients in 35 countries.

Faced with an aging infrastructure, Russell needed to migrate to newer technology for its server operating system and messaging platform to achieve greater productivity, business efficiency and security. It decided to upgrade to Windows 2003 and turned to CGI to use its Global Delivery Model in order to handle the migration remotely from Quebec City and Regina.

The Challenge
Russell’s network infrastructure was complex, with half of the organization running on Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 and the other half on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. These in turn supported more than 2,000 desktops across the globe. The organization also maintained multiple database environments. Russell was seeking to standardize server configurations to reduce the total cost of ownership and the number of servers in its environment.

CGI was charged with leading all of the project stages, including planning, design, configuration and testing, deployment, change management and project management. Given the number of servers slotted for migration, Russell needed to automate the process without having to send technicians on site. CGI’s Global Delivery Model is specifically designed to achieve this task.

As a financial services company, Russell must adhere to many strict regulations governing document control, versioning, audit trail and archiving, so CGI had to ensure that all of these functions were operating flawlessly in the migrated system. User acceptance testing would be crucial for these and all system applications, but coordination of such an extensive training initiative can be daunting when the project is being managed off site.

CGI also had to handle the challenges of any project involving multiple sites and remote activities, where inadequate communication or coordination can threaten success.

The Strategy
As the project progressed, CGI took steps to ensure that project team members in the three locations involved – Quebec City, Regina and Tacoma (Washington) worked closely together. The firm also developed clear leadership and accountability within the project, and positioned a few team members at the project site to sustain the project’s momentum and handle those organizational aspects that are better resolved through face to face communication.

Using out-of-the-box tools in Windows Server 2003 and CGI-developed VBS scripts, the CGI team set about automating the entire installation process: from the bare-metal configuration to the operating system installation to the final configuration of the server – including all applications – and data restore. In all, more than 400 applications were migrated by the CGI project team.

User acceptance testing was approached in a highly structured and rigorous fashion. A lab was set up in Tacoma, where CGI technicians migrated applications into the lab environment and implemented all of the test environments using remote technology. Coordinators then ensured that users went into the lab to test the applications and that their acceptance was secured before the project proceeded into the production environment.

The Technology

• Windows Server 2003
• Exchange Server 2003
• SQL Server 2000
• Active Directory
• Dell OpenManage

The Results
Within an eight-month period, the team migrated 200 servers across 14 sites in nine different time zones, with very little downtime or strain on Russell’s support center. At the end of the project, the number of servers was reduced by 20%. In fact, following the success of the migration, CGI received a Microsoft Winning Customer Award in recognition of the near seamless upgrade of Windows NT Server 4.0 to Windows Server 2003 for Russell.

Because the servers were migrated remotely, Russell saved the cost of sending technicians to each of its 13 remote offices located around the world. For example, all of the Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 servers were migrated to Windows Server 2003 remotely from Quebec City. Also, all of the Exchange 5.5 servers were migrated to Exchange 2003 remotely from Regina. In addition, coordinating the migration from CGI’s Quebec City and Regina offices also reduced project costs.

“Overall, we recovered or decommissioned about 50 servers. As a result of this program consolidation, in our SQL farm, we went from standalone database physical servers to a clustered environment,” stated Mr. Stingl. “And there are another 50 to 75 servers we can eventually decommission. We understand the significant role that technology plays in the investment management business. CGI’s engagement allowed us to provide an environment that is flexible, scalable and reliable to support our future business needs.”