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 IBM mainframe makes it possible
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Overview
First National Bank of Omaha takes a distributed environment back to the mainframe and gains reliability, scalability and a simplified infrastructure. |
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Challenges
First National Bank is a 9 billion dollar financial institution within a 16 billion dollar holding company. Our primary business is financial services from credit card issuing to merchant acquiring to your traditional banking products and we also do investment products in insurance such as, brokerage, annuities, and equities. |
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Simplified infrastructure management
If you look at the costs of managing multiple platforms, and we had close to 600 different hardware computing platforms, we had no leverage with any vender, we had multiple operating systems running on multiple different vendor platforms. So I wanted to consolidate that. That's the first thing. The second thing was that I couldn't scale those platforms without buying additional hardware. I didn't have the capabilities of virtual machines or on-demand, so every time I wanted to scale or we had volumes that would require an upgrade it was order a new box. |
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Back to the mainframe
The benefits that I was seeking within the technology operations in the infrastructure side goes back to the underlying strategy of "back to the mainframe". It was reliability, scalability, maintainability, with the lower total cost of ownership. What I got with it as well, was I received, was disaster recovery in a less complex environment to manage. |
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Business application integration
System z integrates into our overall fabric of the infrastructure very nicely. Our traditional applications that make the money, or provide revenue for this company, all run on the System z, they've been running there for 30 years: your traditional Cobol-based, VSAM-based applications, those are our credit card systems, our merchant systems, as well as our traditional banking systems. |
| Our Web applications running under WebSphere are traditionally presentation layers and the data resides within the legacy apps. So it's a banking application for consumers or, say, payment engine for our credit card customers, or for our merchant business to settle their transactions. So now both of them reside within the same platform interconnected through messaging broker-based software. |
| The IBM software products that we are running on System z, first of all, starting with the databases, are all DB2. |
| We use the Rational suite as part of the System z as well. We've just acquired the WebSphere Business Integrator, to augment, or I would say, go to the next generation of the MQSeries products, plus the z/VM, we're using z/VM on the System z as well, that's pretty much within the integrated facilities for Linux. |
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Linux on System z
There's a lot of people that said you're ahead of you're time, its not ready for primetime. Well, I'll assure you that its ready for primetime and we have multiple applications that are performing better within that environment, than with our old physical environment, running a multitude of operating systems. |
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Systems management flexibility
We have millions and millions of transactions around the week of Christmas, and at that time we pretty much have to shut down development environments. So then if you're shutting down your development environment, you're putting a delay on you're future because those development efforts are the future of this company with new products and services. That's why on demand was important, so that I didn't have all this fixed overhead just for a few days, when I needed the processing capabilities. So, we're in a position this holiday season to turn up capacity, to handle that, as well as to continue to do the development activities, and the R&D that we need to do to support future products. |
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The mainframe and the community
I believe there's a belief out there in the academia world, within the students, and I believe it starts in the grade schools and high schools, that we're still very much a distributed computing environment on PC's. |
| But if you look at the business world and you look at what's happened in the last 30 years, and look at the next 30 years, you're always going to see that the mainframe is still the most reliable platform. |
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Future business deployment
Our plan for System z for the future is we still have some migration left, activities. And after that we're going to continue to leverage System z to, possibly, with data warehousing systems, as well as other new applications. |
| So when we go out with technology questionnaires, when we're looking at new business applications, it now says our preferred environment is System z. |
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