Banking Industry IconModernizing and optimizing operations continue to be among the top priorities for organizations. Indeed, many information technology surveys indicate digital business is driving different thinking and new activity toward new investments. Organizations are exploiting new technologies to keep pace with the demands of business growth, competition, and customer experience.
The Story
Modernization and optimization are strategic initiatives driving one Alebra Technologies customer, a multi-national bank, who determined to drive cost out of mainframe operations. The bank was faced with growing data volumes that require lots more processing on the mainframe. SFTP data transfers were taking 55% of the batch window. It was taking 4 hours and 10,500 MIPS to transfer one 117 GB file over TCP/IP from the mainframe to a Linux server, at a cost that was too high. Capacity-on-Demand had to be invoked periodically at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to finish month and quarter-end processing on time.
The data protection officer understood the problem and acted. He researched file transfer alternatives and found Alebra. The data protection officer learned that Alebra not only moves data across platforms at a dramatically lower cost, but in significantly less time as well. After a meeting with the Alebra team, he made the business case for making a change. His executive team understood the need to change, and in a short time the bank and Alebra went to work.
The Objectives
The bank’s investment in new technologies includes a mainframe data exchange platform that supports the bank’s modernization and cost optimization strategy. The investment needed to support 3 main requirements:
- Mainframe data transfers direct to storage and Hadoop edge nodes, data piping to VM client databases, and concurrent read/write storage access.
- A data network that exploits a 100Gb network once the data is landed, avoiding transferring it again.