Business Situation

Every day, the systems of Consorzio Operativo Gruppo MPS execute millions of online transactions and many batch procedures on mainframes of member banks and of the other companies within the consortium. The Bank’s Mainframe system has addressing all sorts of batch process. However, as it has become an increasingly multi-channel architecture, it has evolved to support real time applications as well.

The bank’s management needed to:

• Reduce business risk by reducing the workload on the central mainframe.
• Improve the system performance and reduce costs related to data processing.
• Optimise the distributive processing capacity of the bank’s 3,000 Department Servers and 20.000 desktops
• Ensure the effective utilization of the group of around one thousand servers centrally located in the Central Server Farm.

Solution

Avanade joined forces with management at Development Division (Architecture Office) and at the Group’s Division staff (Competence Center)to develop a solution based on Grid Computing called the Avanande Grid Archtecture (AGA).

AGA runs on the Microsoft .NET platform. Its design is that of a typical Service Oriented Architecture. Each of the functionalities of the system being supported is exposed as a web service. The ‘chat’ between each of the nodes and the central system is based on SOAP protocol on HTTP and leverages a security model defined for WS-Security. Particular attention has been devoted to application security issues. For example, by implementing the so-called Code Access Security, it is possible to allow the infrastructure to execute only digitally signed tasks. Alternatively the AGA can ensure that only the infrastructure can initiate execution of tasks and prevent additional tasks being initiated or authorized. On top of this security, there is flexibility and developers can quickly implement new processing tasks thanks to a set of APIs which is provided. The solution is going to be extended to support computing nodes on the Linux platform: this will open up new technology integration opportunities.

Results

• The original task is quickly transformed into grid format and executed in the most efficient manner on hardware that does not have to be task-dedicated
• The flexibility to easily extend the execution farm on the basis of processing peaks (what they internally call “overflow” of processing capabilities)
• Parallel Processing is now feasible and it is also possibleresource in new page to undertake processing at non-peak times to improve utilization and turnaround time.
• There is much greater flexibility in scheduling processing tasks with consequent reduced management overhead
• The architecture can be easily extended thanks to the management and development tools provided