Deutsche Postbank has doubled its IT infrastructure to
deal with its SAP software, and is planning to process transactions
for two German banks.
Postbank's SAP system, set up in October 2003 and running on IBM
hardware, processes more than 10 million transactions a day, and
could easily handle double that figure, said Postbank's press
officer Hartmut Schlegel.
The SAP system is designed to manage customer transactions from
Postbank's online and IVR (interactive voice responsive) services,
plus its 9,000 branch offices.
The SAP software will allow Postbank to offer processing
services to other banks, such as Deutsche Bank and Dresdner
Bank, who will outsource their payment transactions to Postbank
later this year.
SAP was brought in to replace a legacy system, running on
Fujitsu-Siemens Computers equipment, which was barely keeping up
with the demands put upon it, Schlegel said.
The system handles transactions and stores details of individual
checking accounts. Later this year, modules for savings accounts
and loan accounts will be added, and the system is capable of
creating and handling new products, such as checking accounts with
loan facilities included.
Postbank has centralised all IT hardware at a datacentre in
Bonn. The IT hardware was previously spread across six centres
around Germany, and the centralisation has reduced costs.
The IBM equipment installed includes four IBM z900 mainframes to
be used as SAP database servers with DB2/zOS as the database for
SAP account management.
Eight IBM eServer p690 systems with Power4 processor technology
and up to 32 processors each have been installed as SAP application
servers, and four ESS 800 disc systems have been installed,
providing a total storage capacity of more than 40Tbytes.
Data is mirrored to a remote datacentre via PPRC (peer-to-peer
remote copy) to provide security.
Gillian Law writes for IDG News Service