INDUSTRY

Postbank, with 11.5 million customers the biggest private customer bank in Germany, is running its new backbone IT-system - an SAP transaction platform - on an IT infrastructure developed by IBM. This Postbank project was designed to modernise the IT infrastructure of Postbank and give it competitive edge.The bank's new transaction platform handles more than 10 million bookings per day and can double this number on demand. This step is part of a major IT innovation programme that German Postbank has been driving for several years. "Between high performance, scalability and security of the hardware, a reliable and non-interruptive backup process providing guaranteed data consistency was our highest priority", said Dr. Thomas Mangel, Board member of Postbank Systems. "The current implementation proves impressively the realisation of these requests by IBM - using state of the art technology, and allowing an efficient and very economic production with SAP." The SAP/AM giro transaction system, which has been running since October 2003, processes customer transactions from the bank's online and IVR (interactive voice responsive) services as well as its 9.000 branch offices. This is believed to be one of the largest SAP implementations worldwide. Deutsche Bank and Dresdner bank have also published that they will outsource their payment transactions to Postbank in the future. The Postbank solution was designed around the need for capacity on-demand, utilising IBM's autonomic computing features and in-built high availability and data security capabilities. IBM eServer zSeries mainframes, eServer pSeries UNIX servers and TotalStorage systems provide the foundation for Postbank's SAP application. The existing Fujitsu-Siemens mainframe system was replaced with IBM eServer zSeries and eServer pSeries servers. Four IBM z900 mainframes will be used as SAP database servers and for additional backoffice applications . DB2/zOS provides the database platform for SAP/AM in data sharing mode. Among others, data sharing and GDPS (global dispersed parallel sysplex) ensure the highest security standards. For application processing, Postbank chose eight IBM eServer p690 systems as SAP application servers. With IBM POWER4 processor technology and up to 32 processors these UNIX servers deliver extremely high performance. As they can be logically partitioned (LPAR), they are also highly scalable. More than 40 logical partitions process the upcoming workload, including core banking applications for giro accounts and transaction banking as well as the data warehouse SAP/BW and SAP archiving applications. Four ESS 800 disk systems have been installed, providing a total storage capacity of more than 40 Terabyte. Permanent data mirroring to a remote data centre via PPRC (peer-to-peer remote copy) provides security for client data from the core banking system is secure. The IBM application servers were chosen against tough competition, while IBM Global Services developed the migration strategy and middleware for the legacy applications. The new server and storage infrastructure is part of the bank's project "IT 2003 that Postbank began in 2000, and has now completed successfully. "The next step in our IT innovation process will be the implementation of SAP/CML for consumer loans.", said Dr.Thomas Mangel. IBM has been working with the bank since the beginning of the project and is also supporting the whole development and testing phase during the system roll out.