Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Gruppo BNP Paribas virtualizes its SAP application landscape on IBM Power Systems servers

Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) is part of the international BNP Paribas Group. BNL offers both retail and corporate banking services, principally in Italy, serving millions of customers since 1913. The bank was one of the first in Italy to adopt SAP applications, starting with human resources and procurement functions, and subsequently introducing SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW).

More recently, BNL needed to implement general ledger and SAP Bank Analyzer applications to meet growing regulatory and control requirements. With the new applications came the requirement to add new compute capacity to the existing infrastructure, particularly for the very high peak workload created by SAP Bank Analyzer.

SAP Bank Analyzer supports overall bank control functions by calculating, evaluating, and analyzing financial products. The system takes data from source systems and provides a consistent view of a bank’s operational data, designed to enable management assessment of current financial and risk information, specifically for compliance with Basel II and IAS regulations.

Leopoldo Palombini, Head of BNL IT Central Systems Management, explains that one possibility was adding a number of new Intel processor-based servers. However, individual standalone servers would be under-utilized for much of the time, representing a wasted investment in compute capacity.

After meticulous analysis among different vendors, BNL selected and purchased two IBM Power 595 servers, each with 48 processors.

“This hugely powerful platform offers excellent server virtualization capabilities, allowing us to run the new SAP applications, existing SAP and other applications, all within the same physical server,” says Leopoldo Palombini. “It guarantees us flexibility, strength and the required performance standard, as well as providing a simple IT infrastructure.”

Virtualizing the infrastructure

BNL realized that the most cost-efficient way to introduce the new general ledger and SAP Bank Analyzer applications would be if they could be consolidated to the same physical server as non-SAP applications. When the compute-intensive SAP Bank Analyzer was running, resources could be re-assigned from non-critical applications to ensure that agreed performance targets were achieved.

The virtualization capabilities of IBM AIX on the IBM POWER5 processor architecture allows BNL to run SAP Bank Analyzer, SAP General Ledger, and standard banking applications such as trade finance, credit and treasury in appropriately-sized virtual servers on a single physical machine. Because the times of peak workload for each application do not coincide, BNL is able to set performance priorities that automatically allocate a suitable share of the processing, memory and I/O capacity to each application.

Leopoldo Palombini comments, “While managing large numbers of servers was never a difficulty for us, being able to run SAP Bank Analyzer, the general ledger, and other line-of-business applications on virtual servers on the Power 595 servers is a great business advantage. IBM virtualization allows us to set automated policies that assign capacity exactly as required, so that we make more efficient use of our total compute power, and are able to provide an efficient, cost-effective service to the business.”

Resilience against failure

BNL not only runs both SAP and other applications in logical partitions on each server, it also runs separate production, development and test environments on the same Power 595 servers. Resources from these non-critical areas are transferred to the live environments automatically by the priority-based virtualization rules.

The two servers are linked using IBM PowerHA, in an active stand-by. Should one server fail, through disaster or power outage, the remaining server is able to support the complete workload. Using the active stand-by arrangement, service downtime is reduced to less than 15 minutes.

Completing the picture, the two servers are in separate data centers some 12km apart. Some 5.2TB of production and 7.1TB of development and test data is stored on IBM System Storage DS8300 storage servers. If one data center is out of action, the remaining location has both full data and active applications, which can be used as a complete disaster recovery solution.

Advantages of IBM System p

The Power 595 running AIX is able to create virtual servers in logical partitions (LPARs) using as little as one-tenth of a processor. Each LPAR may be increased increments of one per cent of a processor, allowing very close matching between workload and CPU allocation. Each virtual server’s resources may be dynamically adjusted, automatically, as workload varies, controlled by policies determined by service level agreement.

“The Power 595 servers offer excellent stability and performance combined with relatively low operational costs,” says Leopoldo Palombini. “The build-quality from IBM is superb, as is the quality of its support, so in our opinion the Power 595 represented the best and most cost-effective platform for our new business-critical SAP applications.”

Leopoldo Palombini says, “Our investments in IBM hardware and SAP software continue to produce excellent results for the company. Smooth, reliable data flow is of strategic importance to every bank, and the combination of IBM and SAP technologies enable us to achieve this goal without high operational costs or complexity.”

Strategic benefits of DB2

BNL has deployed IBM DB2 information management software to support the high-volume workload generated by the SAP Bank Analyzer application. DB2 offers both excellent performance and ease of use, with autonomic features that reduce the administration requirements.

“We are using DB2 to support SAP Bank Analyzer because it offers performance and scalability needed to handle large volumes of data. DB2 is very easy to use with comprehensive autonomic features that reduce the administration workload,” says Leopoldo Palombini.

“The alignment of the product maintenance schedules for DB2 and the SAP 5-1-2 gives the freedom to run the current DB2 release alongside the corresponding SAP software release. This matching of cycles allows us to upgrade if we want to use the new functionality of the latest DB2 release, but does not require it – freeing us from enforced system work. We feel that the strategic partnership between SAP and IBM gives BNL the right solution both for today and in the future.”

Great results from SAP and IBM

With the Power 595 servers in place, BNL has a more scalable and flexible platform for its SAP and other applications. As regulatory and reporting requirements change and grow, BNL can use the virtualization capabilities to ensure that performance levels continue to be met without requiring additional investments in physical server hardware.

Leopoldo Palombini concludes, “Both SAP and IBM represent quality and reliability, and we knew from the beginning that the new servers would deliver outstanding SAP application performance. Though we cannot quantify the results, reliability and service delivery are paramount to BNL, and SAP applications distributed using advanced virtualization on the IBM Power 595 servers produce great results.”