IBM Touts Power Server Deals with Russian Banks
December 14, 2010 Alex Woodie
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Two Russian Banks will install new Power7-based servers to run their operations, IBM announced last week. One of the banks, Alfa-Bank, will run IBM i applications on its servers, while the other, Rosbank, will run AIX. Alfa-Bank is upgrading from an older model of System i, iSeries, or AS/400 server to a pair of new Power7 servers that provide the processing overhead for future growth. The company, which uses the IBM i-based Equation banking system from Misys, started with the IBM midrange platform 10 years ago. Since then, it has grown significantly, and now counts 4.1 million private clients and 40,000 corporate clients as customers. The privately held bank, which has about $22 billion in assets, has 340 branches across Russia, and also operates subsidiaries in the U.S., the U.K., and the Netherlands. “At Alfa-Bank, it is crucial that our technology investments scale in line with our accelerated growth,” says Artem Shakhverdyan, deputy head of Alfa-Bank’s Integration Systems Office, in a press release. “Power7’s unprecedented performance and virtualization capabilities meet our bank’s business development needs for the next four years.” Also purchasing a pair of new Power7 servers is Rosbank, another large privately owned Russian bank that operates more than 600 branches across 70 regions of the sprawling country, as well as Switzerland and Belarus. Rosbank plans to run AIX-based analytical workloads on its new servers, according to IBM. The company had invested in a range of IBM middleware, including DB2, WebSphere, and InfoSphere DataStage, to help it analyze a large amount of transactional data. A new CRM system is also being developed for the new AIX servers. “IBM Power7 systems offer an excellent cost/performance ratio and provide a powerful tool to draw insight about customer trends and improve our competitive position,” states Olga Skorobogatova, deputy chairman of Rosbank’s management board, in a press release.
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