A German bank started to notice its ageing IBM i hardware was struggling to keep up with the bank’s global processing requirements. The task would take anywhere from half an hour up to four hours. Finding a new solution to process and scale time-sensitive transactions became critical since the company supports businesses in London and New York.
Because of the sensitive nature of financial services, the organisation needed to find a partner experienced in highly regulated sectors. After some research, the bank decided to work with Service Express for its market position, capabilities and reputation.
Ageing equipment, limited capacity and absence of a reliable test environment
After learning more about the bank’s immediate and long-term needs, Service Express identified the following challenges:
- Over eight year old IBM i equipment
- The company’s disaster recovery (DR) centre taking between 16 and 20 hours to restore from backup, making it unreliable in an unexpected event
- Limited hardware capacity doesn’t allow for a second logical partition (LPAR), which is critical for developing a test environment
- Restricted amount of physical space for equipment
Optimised existing systems and migrated data to Specialty Cloud for IBM Power
After initial conversations and project discovery, the company gave Service Express the approval to assist with several initiatives:
- Migrate data to Service Express’ Specialty Cloud for IBM Power, which is fully certified by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) as a Level 1 provider
- Assist in rearranging, redesigning and maximising the company’s existing environment
- Develop a much-needed test environment to match the capabilities of production, improving DR processes
Upon completion of the project, the bank noticed increased productivity by eliminating the need to manage old hardware and experience latency due to limited capacity. The company’s DR test environment no longer took over 16 hours to back up, which enabled the bank’s IT team to gain confidence in its systems.
