Karen Malone, Managing Director, Centaur Fund Services, Neil Stone-Wigg, Chief Technology Officer, Trilogy Technologies, Eric Bertrand, Director, Centaur and Edel Creely, Managing Director, Trilogy Technologies.

CENTAUR FUND SERVICES

€150,000 Fully Virtualised IT infrastructure and Disaster Recovery solution for Centaur Fund Services

Centaur Fund Services was founded by Karen Malone, Ronan Daly and Eric Bertrand in January 2009 to provide a fund administration service that gives the hedge fund manager the feeling they never outsourced their securities in the first place. The company employs 10 staff at their offices in Dublin.

All three have run fund administration businesses handling a wide variety of fund structures and strategies in offices all over the world. Centaur has implemented a state of the art IT infrastructure and also a disaster recovery solution to reduce business risk, deliver high availability and eliminate the risk of business outage.

“As a start up hedge fund administrator we had a number of very important issues to consider when it came to technology”, explains Karen Malone, Director, Centaur Fund Services. “The infrastructure, the network to support our business now and into the future, support – do we outsource the project which would give us access to many skill sets within one organisation, who can advise, implement, support what we need and what would the cost be”? Centaur is very experienced in the marketplace and familiar with what is available to them. They decided to outsource the project to Trilogy Technologies as they found them to be very customer focused, responsive and professional in their approach. Working closely with the company, Trilogy Technologies put together a strategic advice document which Centaur decided to implement. “We needed a robust infrastructure that would allow increased efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness by effectively connecting resources to business needs”, continues Karen.

Trilogy Technologies worked with the company to integrate SunGard for Fund Accounting and HWM Mantra for Investor Services. In addition to business applications Trilogy Technologies installed the infrastructure on a complete virtualisation model using VMWare and VMware View by implementing ten virtualised servers on a fully redundant platform, as well as implementing virtualised desktops running on HP thin clients. Trilogy Technologies worked with Centaur to integrate its recovery infrastructure into the company’s high connectivity network to its hot site using technology from ResQ, VMWare, HP, Kaseya EndPoint Security and Microsoft. This provides the infrastructure to allow online replication for Centaur’s email, servers and applications by mirroring them to a hot site location based off site which, each night, provides an incremental back up for the system state of the remaining servers and rebuilds an updated image of same in the hot site.

“We now have real time online replication with regard to our email and applications and this allows us to respond quickly in the event of any failure or disaster. If our systems go down, I have the security of knowing that switching to our DR environment will allow users experience minimum disruption times”, says Karen. The next phase for Centaur is straightforward as they grow their business as they can simply utilise the technology they have invested in to seamlessly support many more users with no associated growth pains.

“The implementation of VMWare View, desktop virtualisation, is highly innovative and is at the forefront of the technology curve”, explains Neil Stone-Wigg, Chief Technology Officer at Trilogy Technologies. “It places Centaur in an enviable position where they can now embrace the full benefits and reduced total cost of ownership from this solution”.

“We can now move forward with confidence knowing that we have a solid IT infrastructure in place that is future-proof and can scale for growth”, concludes Karen. “It is also cost effective in the long-run, which means we can manage this system and deliver additional functionalities into the future”.