Landesbank Baden-Württemberg

Story Details

After a period of business expansion when Germany’s Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) acquired a number of regional banks, the company saw the number of employees grow which strained the bank's IT infrastructure. One area specifically impacted was the bank's Lotus Notes email environment. The increase in users and traffic pushed the Lotus Notes email infrastructure to its limits and forced the bank's legacy Sun Enterprise 10000 servers to run at full capacity.

This led the bank to launch a project to refresh the existing infrastructure with a scalable, energy-efficient hardware solution that could support the bank long-term and minimize costs. Günter Mattinger, datacenter manager at LBBW says, "The internal IT department is regarded as the LBBW provider that supplies high-quality services to assist operational change.” As such, the bank began searching for a stable, sustainable system that offered increased performance.

In 2007, LBBW chose to replace its legacy Sun servers with two Sun Fire T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. The new servers included UltraSPARC T1 processors, whose Chip Multithreading (CMT) technology enables a maximum of 32 simultaneous computing threads. By selecting these machines, LBBW achieved the necessary level of performance and cut costs.

More recently, LBBW wanted to expand the email infrastructure to cope with the increasing size and number of user mailboxes. The company turned to Sun again, this time implementing two Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 servers, which include the newer UltraSPARC T2 processor technology. The CMT technology in these chips ensures they can handle up to 64 simultaneous threads while consuming just 95 watts of power. In addition, the servers offer built-in and no-cost virtualization technologies, which IT administrators are enabling using Logical Domains (LDoms) to assign physical resources and one or more threads for each domain. Michael Riedel, project team leader at LBBW says, "The new UltraSPARC machines impressed us in every way. So it was no wonder that the servers found their way into both our mirrored datacenters in Stuttgart.”

The LBBW migration projects for the conversion to the CMT technology were completed in just a few weeks. Since this time, more than 13,500 Lotus Notes users have connected to the systems. All data is stored in a central storage area network (SAN) based on the Sun StorageTek 9990 and 9990V enterprise disk systems, which offer storage virtualization capability, logical partitioning, superior scalability and hundreds of petabytes of capacity. During the migration process, the SAN enabled the Sun servers to be installed during live operation and be docked immediately. Sun Professional Services advised LBBW on correctly sizing the system and worked with Lotus Notes specialists on fine-tuning the system.

Since completing work on the email platform, LBBW has deployed more Sun servers with CMT technology in other areas of the IT infrastructure. Riedel says, "With CMT technology, Sun servers offer exceptional performance at a low price. We were able to significantly reduce costs, energy consumption, and space requirements for the Lotus Notes platform. In view of today's rising electricity prices, we are really happy about this benefit."