Fiducia conducts 70 million daily transactions with IBM System z and IMS

Fiducia IT AG is the largest IT services host in the cooperative financial system in Germany. The core business of the Fiducia Group is the provision of IT services for credit unions and financial services enterprises as well as for private banks. Fiducia needs to provide the data security and integrity required by the banking industry, and the accessibility demanded by its customers.

Challenge
More than 800 corporate banks in Germany’s cooperative banking sector depend on Fiducia for IT hosting services and financial transactions, and those banks have 10,000 branches, more than 22,000 ATMs and 63 million accounts.

“In banking, availability and security are critical, and our customers accept no downtimes for their clients,” says Wolfgang Strauch, of the database and communications department at Fiducia. “We must do all we can to ensure that data is not lost and that it is available 24x7 while conducting 70 million transactions a day.”

To support such an enormous workload, Fiducia depends on its IBM® IMS™ and IBM System z10® mainframes. A few years ago, Fiducia joined the IBM Quality Partnership Program to implement a new release of IMS. The IBM Quality Partnership Program is a development process initiated by IBM to further ensure high-quality software delivery of IMS releases. Early customer involvement and input is a major attribute of QPP.

Solution
The Fiducia IT environment includes five IBM System z10 mainframes. Using IBM’s Parallel Sysplex technology, Fiducia has divided these five machines into three parallel Sysplex’s which behave like single, logical computing facilities. One of the sysplexes handles test and development, and the other two form the production environment.

“The IBM System z mainframe supports our 24x7 availability and delivers fast, secure and stable performance,” says Strauch. “With System z, we need less staff to manage all of our systems and security than would be required for a distributed environment.”

The banking system environment includes IBM DB2® for zO/S and IBM WebSphere® MQ. WebSphere MQ reliably delivers data from one application to another, helping the bank avoid the costly and debilitating IT complexity associated with its point-to-point connectivity and integration. WebSphere MQ helps Fiducia improve the flow of information across the organization, and positions it to adjust to dynamic business requirements, reduce maintenance and integration costs and bridge to new technologies. The database and communications department of Fiducia manages this entire IMS, DB2 and WebSphere MQ environment with just 20 people.

Pleased with its previous participation in the IBM Quality Partnership Program, Strauch recently rejoined for the release of Version 11 of IMS. Fiducia gets reliable support from the QPP, as well as the opportunity to provide input into product features.

“We felt that IMS 11 addressed some key areas, including business flexibility, simplified administration and growth while we continue to provide data security and availability to our clients,” says Strauch. IMS Connect, an integrated function of IMS, improves IMS TCP/IP access and enables easier access to IMS applications and data from the Internet. IMS Connect provides high performance communications for IMS, connecting one or more TCP/IP clients or local IBM z/OS® clients with one or more IMS systems. Using IMS Connect, Fiducia IT is now connected to over 6,500 servers and has a three-tier architecture with more than 100,000 workstations at its various client banks.

“The openness of IMS fits well with our heterogeneous system platforms,” notes Strauch. “IMS is the only system we have found that can manage the tremendous workload of our banking systems which process 2,700 transactions per second.” Fiducia IT AG uses RACF (Resource Action Control Facility), a component of the z/OS Security Server on the System z platform, to protect data. RACF protects vital system resources and controls what users can do on the operating system.

Strauch and his colleagues are also utilizing several IMS tools, including the IMS Library Integrity Utility. With this utility it is possible to generate ACBs very quickly. An ACB is a control block created from the output of database description block and program specification block generation, and placed in the ACB library for use during online and database batch region type execution of IMS.

“ACB generation used to take six hours or more, but using the Library Integrity Utility of IMS that same task is now down to six minutes for 22,000 ACBs,” says Strauch. The Fiducia team is also utilizing IMS Queue Control Facility, IMS Batch Terminal Simulator and IMS Problem Investigator.

Strauch finds the Quality Partnership Program very valuable. “I’d recommend that anyone who has the opportunity to join the Quality Partnership Program should do so,” he says. “The QPP team understands your needs so problems are solved immediately We depend on IBM System z and IMS, and they keep us in business.”

Benefits
• Large, heterogeneous environment supported by small staff
• 24x7 availability for eBanking and ATM transactions
• Generating of ACBs from six hours down to six minutes

For more information, visit:
ibm.com/systems/zibm.com/software/systemzibm.com/software/data/managementibm.com/software/data/imsibm.com/software/websphere