K.P. Singh, Senior DBA, Enterprise Information Management

Kara Cummings

Founded in 1889, Ohio Savings Bank has grown from a savings and loan with a single branch office in Cleveland and $20,000 in assets to one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders. Today, the privately held bank has 50 branches in Ohio, 20 locations in southeast Florida and Phoenix through its AmTrust Bank division, and nearly $13 billion in assets. In 2004, Ohio Savings began grappling with the effects of a growing business that was stressing its IT infrastructure and becoming a drain on financial and human resources. As an alternative, the bank began entertaining the concept of consolidating its legacy systems with an enterprise grid computing solution from Oracle. Such a system, the bank reasoned, would increase performance and stability, give the bank the option of altering the mix and focus of resources, and boost availability.

Ohio Savings' customers interact heavily with the bank's automated services, therefore the bank wanted a solution that would create a service-based architecture for its call center, mortgage, and data warehouse applications. The company chose Oracle 10g grid technology, which uses Oracle Database 10g , Oracle Application Server 10g , Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g , Oracle Cluster Ready Services, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, Oracle Data Guard, and Oracle Automatic Storage Management to coordinate large numbers of servers and storage so they operate like one large computer. With the grid system, Ohio Savings saw the potential to grow and save at the same time. We invested in Oracle 10g grid technology to scale our resources and provide the support and services we have become known for, said Jo Ann Boylan, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer. The solution Ohio Savings chose was Oracle on HP Intel and Red Hat Linux 3.0. The new configuration will eventually consolidate servers from multiple vendors.