Commerzbank in North America is using BladeFrame servers from Egenera as the utility platform for a phased migration of mission critical Unix applications to Linux and Microsoft Windows.
The Egenera implementation has enabled significant server consolidation at the US headquarters of the German bank, claims the vendor, reducing floor-space requirements by 90% while tripling capacity.
Richard Arenaro, vice president, information technology, Commerzbank, says the move to open systems at the New York data centre is designed to deliver an IT infrastructure that can respond rapidly to changing market conditions.
"At the same time, the mission-critical applications we support require uncompromised reliability," he says. "Through its PAN architecture and unique virtualisation capabilities, the Egenera BladeFrame gives us the confidence to move our most important services to an open source, non-proprietary platform and to repurpose resources on-the-fly."
He says the underlying architecture has allowed Commerzbank to move from the 1:1 failover scheme deemed necessary with its Unix platform to a more cost-effective 1:6 ratio.
Benchmarks evaluating the Egenera BladeFrame against the incumbent Unix machine also demonstrated better performance for mission-critical Oracle database applications, says Arenaro.