MSI Helps First National Bank of Omaha Improve On Demand Performance Via a Streamlined IT Infrastructure

First National Bank of Omaha (FNBO) is the heart of First National of Nebraska, which has become one of the largest and most highly respected regional banking institutions west of the Mississippi. Throughout its 150-year history, FNBO has built an exemplary reputation for providing highly personalized service and innovative banking solutions. Equally impressive is FNBO's ranking as the 12th largest credit card issuing and processing organization in the United States.

Maintaining a leadership role in today's highly competitive banking and financial services markets demands cutting edge IT performance.

"The MSI/IBM team delivered a very powerful and highly flexible enterprise computing infrastructure that is 90 percent smaller and far less complex than the system it replaced. For FNBO, that means greater productivity, increased efficiency, and more flexibility." - Ken Kucera

The Challenge

Evolving customer service offerings and operational requirements increased the demand for additional computing capabilities.

By 2002, banking and credit card operations were still running on the bank's IBM z900 mainframe, but other applications like web-based banking and office-related systems were assigned to a disparate array of standalone boxes, making the environment difficult to manage. Distributed processing assets had grown to more than 30 Sun Solaris servers and over 560 Intel servers. Each server had dedicated processing and storage resources that couldn't be shared.

Across the entire computing infrastructure, processor utilization averaged a mere 12 percent and storage utilization was around 14 percent. Keeping this complex and inefficient system up and running was becoming difficult and costly for the IT department. Server proliferation and maintenance were making it necessary to increase the IT staff by 30 percent per year just to keep the problems under control.

According to Ken Kucera, FNBO Senior Vice President and head of Enterprise Technology Services, "Our computing infrastructure was becoming increasingly cumbersome, inefficient, and hard to manage. We had an under-utilized IBM zSeries 900 mainframe and an eclectic collection of distributed processing servers, each running a different application." Kucera knew the problem would only get worse if he didn't make some drastic changes. FNBO had to streamline the enterprise computing infrastructure to increase performance, improve the ability to quickly adjust to changing market conditions, better support banking affiliates, and lower the TCO to a reasonable level.

The MSI/IBM Solution

In January of 2003, Kucera developed a strategy referred to as "Back to the Mainframe-Enterprise Systems". His concept was to leverage the power of the existing IBM mainframe by moving all the Web-related applications to that platform. Intel-based applications would be consolidated on a far more efficient and manageable array of blade servers. A shared Storage Area Network (SAN) would support the blade servers. He turned to MSI and IBM for help.

MSI and IBM representatives worked closely with Kucera to develop a detailed plan for achieving FNBO's goals and objectives. The overall goal was to enable the IT department to stay well ahead of FNBO marketing and business development activities and be ready to efficiently take on newly generated business. MSI and IBM engineers collaborated with FNBO engineers to confirm that the bank's existing IBM mainframe offered an ideal core around which FNBO could create a new enterprise class infrastructure that would:

• Be based on very stable enterprise level hardware and software.
• Collapse the distributed processing system into more manageable processing environments.
• Create an "on demand" capability to assure optimum responsiveness, while constraining TCO.
• Provide for future growth through clear upgrade and migration paths.
• Deliver maximum reliability and durability.

The MSI team arranged for an IBM Zodiac study to assure that the proposed approach met expected productivity and TCO improvements. The study validated the approach, pointing out specific areas where server consolidation would have significant beneficial results. Based on these findings, the MSI/IBM team initiated a multi-faceted program that restructured FNBO's entire enterprise level computing environment by upgrading the mainframe, securing On Off Capacity On Demand (OOCOD) pricing, and consolidating server/storage capabilities.

Improved Mainframe Capabilities & Utilization

On Demand Upgrades - FNBO's installed IBM z900 was upgraded to a z990, with capacity for up to 32 processors. The mainframe now boasts three engines used by z/OS for database and transaction processing. A fourth engine is available for on demand use under a special "pay when used" pricing arrangement, covering both hardware and software. Three other z990 engines are characterized as Integrated Facilities for Linux (IFL) engines.

The hardware supports many virtual Linux applications as well as FNBO's WebSphere based online banking applications. This multiple application support eliminates the need for 30 physical distributed UNIX servers. Additional IFLs are available on demand to support peak workloads.

Linux for zSeries - The IBM z/OS software is complemented by Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server software, which has significantly reduced software licensing costs. The web banking applications running under zLinux are served data from the bank's z/OS-based DB2, CICS and IMS application systems.

Security - The Zodiac Study explored the potential to consolidate enterprise firewalls supporting web applications. FNBO acquired a StoneSoft Security Gateway to support firewall and VPN functions for web applications. By using zVM for virtualization, FNBO is able to deploy as many Linux servers as required to meet their processing needs.

Server Consolidation

The 550 distributed Intel-based applications that were running on individual servers are being transferred to two IBM BladeCenters, currently housing about 65 blade servers. The MSI/IBM team utilized VMware to create 18 virtual servers on each blade server, for an 18:1 consolidation ratio, collapsing the physical server network down to a very manageable level. The BladeCenters are also equipped with extra blades that can simply be turned on when needed, providing lots of headroom for growth. Server consolidation has also significantly lowered software licensing and hardware-related costs.

Storage Consolidation

The BladeCenters are connected to an IBM SAN that provides plenty of shared storage room, while eliminating over 12 Terabytes of excess storage space. The former environment also required numerous routers and firewalls. The new environment uses two highly redundant routers and new intrusion detection devices.

The Benefits

According to Kucera, "With the assistance of the MSI/IBM team, we were able to deliver a very powerful and highly flexible enterprise computing infrastructure that is 90 percent smaller and far less complex than the system it replaced. For FNBO, that means greater productivity, increased efficiency, and more flexibility at a much lower cost."