KRBS is the only building society based in Kent. Incorporating the Chatham Reliance (established 1898), Dover District (established 1861), Herne Bay (established 1888) and Kent and Canterbury (established 1847), KRBS has served the people of Kent for over 150 years.

The organisation has assets of over £2.3 billion with a branch and agency network throughout the county. The products and service that made them the natural choice in Kent for mortgages and savings are available to borrowers and savers nationwide.

Steve Dockrell, Head of IT at KRBS, wanted to investigate some performance issues with the current HP EVA SAN environment and ensure that replication functionality was configured correctly. KRBS operate two HP EVA6000 SANs connected via Brocade Multi Protocol Routers to provide replication over IP.

Following an initial meeting and site visit, System Professional was invited to carry out a two day technical consulting exercise. Steve was impressed with the HP storage credentials of System Professional and their proven track record in providing quality technical documentation.

An initial inspection of all elements of the storage configuration was performed by Bruce English, System Professional's Master ASE Lead Consultant, utilising the following tools:

- HP Command View EVA

- Brocade Fabric Manager

- Emulex Light Pulse

Performance traces were taken over a 24 Hour period utilising the following tools:

- HP EVA PerfMon

- Windows PerfMon

- Brocade Fabric Manager

All performance data was then taken off-site for further analysis. The submitted report contained detailed reporting and recommendations on the EVA Disk Groups, SAN Fabric Zoning, Virtual Disk (Vdisk) configurations, Firmware Revisions, Latencies, Host Ports Queue Depth, Switch Infrastructure and Performance Monitoring.

Steve was pleased with the quality of work produced; "System Professional impressed me with their technical understanding of our HP EVA environment and detailed reporting. We would be happy to work with them again around any future HP storage requirements. Bruce is certainly a specialist in his field and thoroughly recommended."