LBBW

Overview – LBBW pivots into the cloud with Meridian IT

To support its international operations, LBBW’s core banking applications need to deliver high performance and total availability 24/7. As part of a move to a new London office, the bank decided to free itself from the burden of managing legacy infrastructure and shift its core banking system into the cloud, with help from Meridian IT.

Business Challenge

For many years, LBBW’s international operations in London, New York and Singapore relied on Midas Plus core banking applications running on the IBM i operating system. LBBW hosted these applications on IBM Power servers running at two data centres in London—a production system at the bank’s main office in the City, and a disaster recovery site at a colocation facility in the suburbs.

The extreme reliability of the IBM platform meant that the bank rarely had any problems with its core banking infrastructure—but over time, the environment began to show its age. The IBM Power servers were several generations behind the state of the art, and the Midas Plus application was not compatible with modern versions of the IBM i operating system.

When LBBW decided to relocate its main office to a new building, it triggered a rethink of the bank’s infrastructure strategy. John Tilsley, Head of IT at LBBW, recalls: “We decided to get out of the business of owning, hosting and managing our own servers. We started looking for a partner that could help us migrate to a private cloud infrastructure and modernise our core banking systems.”

Solution

Following a competitive RFP, LBBW selected Meridian IT as its partner for the cloud transformation project. “Meridian’s proposal was much more cost-effective than the other options, and their private cloud offering was perfectly suited to our needs,” says John Tilsley.

“Moreover, like most financial institutions, we always focus on minimizing risk in our IT projects. Meridian IT had a well-tested and proven cloud solution with lots of strong references, which gave us a lot of confidence that we were in safe hands.”

Over a long weekend, the LBBW IT team worked with Meridian to migrate the existing Midas Plus application into the Meridian Power Cloud. Following repeated, rigorous testing, the application went live on the new IBM Power 10 architecture with no issues and no disruption to the bank’s users.

Following the successful migration, LBBW also asked Meridian to help upgrade the Midas Plus application to Fusion Midas, the latest generation solution from Finastra. “With our on-premises infrastructure, we had processor and memory constraints,” says John Tilsley. “By contrast, the Meridian Power Cloud gives us practically infinite scalability. We’ve now expanded our environment from two LPARs to eight, which means we can run both Midas Plus and Fusion Midas in parallel until we’re confident enough to cut over to the new application and retire the old one.”

He adds: “Throughout the relationship, Meridian have been incredibly helpful and responsive. We appreciate their thought leadership and the strength in depth they provide for the IBM i platform. When there’s a challenge on the horizon they don’t sit back and wait, they come to us with ideas and proposals to help us get ahead of the game.”

Customer Benefits

Moving into the Meridian Power Cloud has enabled LBBW to decommission its London data centres and avoid a large capital investment in new infrastructure, substantially reducing total cost of operations. With the cloud delivery model, the bank pays only for the resources it uses, and can scale processor, memory and disk capacity up and down to align with business needs.

By outsourcing the management of its IBM Power infrastructure to Meridian’s experts, the bank has also significantly reduced systems administration workload for its in-house IT team. “We used to have three people supporting our IBM i environment,” says John Tilsley. “Today, we just have one IBM i developer, and the other two can focus on more valuable and strategic work. Relying on Meridian’s expertise also cuts our recruiting costs, as hiring people who have IBM i skills has become increasingly expensive in London!”

Most important of all, the bank’s cloud transformation has increased its resilience. In its latest disaster recovery tests, LBBW has been able to fail over its core banking applications to a secondary site in less than an hour—a massive improvement on the full day that it used to take with its on-premises infrastructure.

“Meridian deserves credit for building such a strong backbone for its cloud architecture,” concludes John Tilsley. “Combining IBM Power 10’s hardware replication capabilities with Equinix’s market-leading data centre technology gives us certainty that we can recover incredibly quickly if disaster strikes. And in a business where risk management is always at the top of the agenda, that level of confidence is priceless.”