Grupo Financiero BANORTE Achieves 99.99% Availability for Online Financial Services by Consolidating Servers
 
 

Grupo Financiero BANORTE Achieves 99.99% Availability for Online Financial Services by Consolidating Servers

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Grupo Financiero BANORTE is Mexico’s third-largest bank. It has 1,300 branches and 6,200 ATMs, as well as an internet-based service network that serves the corporate sector and individual users.

BANORTE needed to improve its hardware infrastructure to reduce costs, simplify server management, and consolidate servers. The company needed a solid, robust solution that would provide maximum system availability, higher service quality, and faster response times to individual and corporate customers to facilitate growth. BANORTE found the ideal solution by deploying two of Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers. This enabled the company to consolidate a larger number of servers from different vendors and achieve 99.999% online systems availability.

For data protection, BANORTE implemented Oracle’s StorageTek SL8500 modular library system, making it one of the best-equipped banks in Mexico for disaster recovery. The servers run on Oracle Solaris, which provides optimal management capabilities. The archive system is managed by Oracle Solaris ZFS. In addition, with Oracle Real Application Clusters, BANORTE deployed a high-availability system for its mission-critical processes, providing redundancy and automatic replication in case of emergency.

BANORTE also met software requirements to improve customer service and enhance efficiency. It used Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting as a new dashboard to monitor its business and implemented Oracle Essbase to ensure all information is available online. To more effectively manage internal users by giving each user a profile with appropriate permissions, the bank deployed Oracle Identity Management and Oracle Access Management Suite. Further, BANORTE used Oracle WebLogic Server to develop internal applications, ensuring uninterrupted operation, even if a data center outage occurred. Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services performed the implementations and trained the bank’s IT team.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Grupo Financiero BANORTE

  • “For Grupo Financiero BANORTE, it’s important to keep project costs low, and we’ve saved significantly in IT equipment space and energy usage by consolidating hardware and software technologies on Oracle. With Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M9000, we’ve achieved the highest possible availability, enabling us to provide better services to our clients.” – Salvador Sierra Hernández, Director of Technical Support, Grupo Financiero BANORTE

  • Deploy an IT infrastructure that enables the bank to expand its range of online financial services, improving IT resource management and providing high availability
  • Consolidate servers to reduce equipment and power consumption costs
  • Enhance disaster recovery capabilities to further ensure information availability
  • Make all financial information available online, easily accessible to the bank’s officials throughout Mexico
  • Manage users’ access to customer information to ensure each administrator has permission to access financial information that is only pertinent to their position

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to deploy two SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers—each with two terabytes of memory—to transfer knowledge and specialized skills, as well as train internal personnel for optimized system use
  • Consolidated the company's IT infrastructure to improve server management and enhance efficiency
  • Placed different workloads on each SPARC Enterprise M9000 server—including a third-party enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, risk management systems, and an internet fraud prevention system—to achieve 99.99% availability for internet-based services to individual and corporate clients
  • Used Oracle’s StorageTek SL8500 to back up the bank’s information, benefitting from the solution’s capacity—enabling scaling from the 3,200 slots it currently uses to 10,000 slots in the future, and ability to store ten years of data in the same library—increasing data reliability and security without compression
  • Used StorageTek SL8500 in combination with the StorageTek T10000B tape drive—which provides high availability and is three to four times faster than the previous solution, going from a backup speed of 40 megabytes per second to 110 megabytes per second for each tape—to improve information recovery after unexpected events, like power failures
  • Used Oracle Solaris to operate the company’s SPARC servers to enhance management for all systems, and ensure high availability and recovery capabilities for uninterrupted online financial services—such as payments and account management—that improve customer service
  • Achieved the highest possible server availability with Oracle Real Application Clusters, ensuring that mission-critical processes, such as financial transaction authorizations, will operate without interruption and with redundancy, replication, and automatic server failover in case of emergency
  • Deployed Oracle Essbase, which extracts information stored on all systems from the data warehouse and makes it available online, to facilitate better management reporting and improve decision-making
  • Used Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting to generate information dashboards that are updated every 10 minutes—a process that previously took a full day—enabling executives to perform their particular duties and report key information, such as profitability of daily operations and performance of individual bank branches
  • Simplified security processes by using Oracle Identity Management to centralize operations for internal users—so that when a new employee is hired, accounts are automatically and securely generated for that person in all systems, including e-mail and applications
  • Integrated Oracle Access Management Suite with Oracle Identity Management to assign each user an appropriate profile for Web applications used, including home banking users
  • Worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services online, enabling BANORTE technical staff to solve problems more quickly

Why Oracle

Grupo Financiero BANORTE evaluated various providers, but it decided on Oracle.

“We were looking for a strategic technology alliance where we could rely on a company that would deliver services to support our critical business processes. Oracle provides almost total support throughout a project’s life, for both hardware and software infrastructures,” said Salvador Sierra Hernández, director of technical support, Grupo Financiero BANORTE.

Implementation Process

BANORTE worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to deploy Oracle’s SPARC M9000 server and StorageTek SL8500 modular library system, and the corresponding software solutions. During the implementation process, Oracle trained BANORTE’s internal personnel to ensure the bank’s IT team had the knowledge to make efficient use of the tools before, during, and after deployment.

“The quality of the resources provided by Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services is first rate, both locally and globally. It found the experts we needed, with excellent results,” said Hernández.

Resources