Kookmin Bank

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The largest bank in South Korea, Kookmin Bank has more than 24 million customers and 140 branches, and accounts for one-third of South Korea's total bank deposits. The bank is also the country's largest credit card issuer, with more than 14 million customers. While the majority of the bank’s business is conducted within South Korea, Kookmin operates branch offices in the United States, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Japan, to cater to Koreans living overseas. In addition to offering a full range of consumer banking services, the bank provides corporate lending and investment services.

Kookmin Bank’s existing environment was running banking applications for its savings, loans, foreign exchange, and risk management business areas. With 34,000 users, and an IT center located in Seoul, Korea, the bank was running an IBM DB2 hybrid data server and an Oracle Database 10g. The bank’s server environment included a mix of IBM mainframes, IBM Unix servers, HP servers and Sun servers. The server platform was running on a mixed environment, which included Solaris 10 Operating System, IBM Mainframe Z/OS operating system, IBM AIX operating system, HP-UX operating system, and Microsoft Windows. Kookmin Bank was using EMC and Hitachi storage devices with a Brocade SAN switch.

Kookmin Bank was experiencing high IT costs in maintaining its various banking device applications including automatic teller machines (ATMs), banking terminals, and web pages. The existing portal and groupware system were unstable and did not meet Kookmin Bank’s required performance standards. The bank rolled out its K-Portal Project, which was a redesign and upgrade of its existing applications on to a Unix server platform.

To reduce its IT expenditure, the bank implemented the Multi-Channel Integration (MCI) project. MCI is designed to reduce application development costs and application complexity through having the bank’s servers, mainframes, ATMs and PCs communicating with each other via the MCI application layer.

Kookmin Bank was seeking a vendor that could meet its specific performance and reliability criteria. Prior to selecting a vendor, the bank conducted an MCI application benchmark test between HP, IBM and Sun. Based on the results of the benchmark testing, Kookmin Bank selected Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers, Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 servers, and Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers as the platform for a variety of banking services for its 1200 branches throughout Korea.

The bank's network of financial systems incorporates extensive customer information, integrated from a variety of channels and locations that are both convenient and secure. Kookmin Bank's core technology uses Sun's mission-critical server's mainframe RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) capabilities to implement an open source strategy.

Sun SPARC Enterprise servers deliver a highly scalable enterprise-class virtualization and consolidation platform, ideal for high-availability, mission-critical enterprise applications including large-scale databases for its business intelligence data warehouse (BIDW), enterprise resourcing planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) functions. “Sun M9000 provides a stable IT environment and good throughput. Furthermore the M9000s for the K-Portal system deliver the needed application performance,” says Mr.Park, TaeHoon, Team Head, IT Planning Department, Kookmin Bank.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server is running Sun Java web server, Oracle Weblogic, Oracle AquaLogic Interaction, IBM DB2, and Oracle 10g. Kookmin Bank consolidated approximately 50 boxes into eight Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers. Sun's SPARC Enterprise M9000 server can support up to 24 dynamic domains, and is currently supporting more than four domains per system, providing Kookmin Bank with increased server consolidation, enhanced RAS features, and a decrease in IT administration time. The Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers were deployed to run Sun Java Web server, Oracle Weblogic, and TIMS Mail, a local email solution.

Kookmin Bank utilizes Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) , a dynamic tracing framework included in the Solaris 10 Operating System for troubleshooting systemic problems in real time on production systems. DTrace safely and dynamically instruments the running operating system kernel and running applications without rebooting the kernel and recompiling - or even restarting - applications. DTrace has improved performance and system stabilization, and optimized the bank's user applications.

The project began in February 2007 and initial deployment of the MCI Call Center application started in March 2008. The bank's MCI applications are currently being deployed on Sun's M-Series servers at its call centers, banking terminals and ATMs.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 servers are managed with the Extended System Control Facility (XCSF), a redundant pair of service processors that continuously monitor the system hardware configuration and health, domain configuration and status, error monitor, and notification and isolate problems down to the chip level. This allows the bank to schedule maintenance at a regular interval without incurring costly system down time. This highly-reliable and secure environment based on the Solaris 10 Operating System is optimized for mission critical computing and large shared memory applications.

Solaris Cluster 3.2 is being used with DB2 High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR) and Oracle database 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC). Solaris Cluster 3.2 is specifically designed to enhance the manageability of Oracle RAC deployments, increasing the availability of mission critical applications, ensuring Kookmin Bank can run its business environment 24/7, without any interruption in service.

Kookmin Bank was an existing SunSpectrum Support customer. When its IT requirements evolved from operational support to needing more highly advanced preventive services to meet changing business requirements, the bank chose SunSpectrum Gold Support. Sun Gold support is providing Kookmin Bank with 24x7 support, coupled with Sun Professional Services and Sun's Dedicated Technical Support Engineer Service to prevent business impacting issues and quickly resolve issues should they occur. A localized version of Sun Preventive Services helps the bank to identify, measures and manage risk by implementing best practice solutions that result in enhanced system performance and availability within the bank's environment. In June 2008 K-Portal Phase 1 was completed, and the Internet banking application deployment is due to be completed in December 2008. Next steps in deployment include the Capital Market Business System (CMBS) application scheduled for April 2009, K-portal Phase 2 completion by June 2009, with final roll out of the K-portal to be completed by February 2010.