Nomura Bank (Switzerland) Ltd.

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To maintain a competitive edge at Nomura Bank (Switzerland) Ltd., the IT team needed to upgrade an aging infrastructure based on HP Tru64 UNIX. The goal was to find a long-term IT solution that could meet the bank’s requirements for enhanced performance, increased fault tolerance, and greater scalability.

The bank evaluated proposals from three major vendors. The proposal from Sun was developed by Sun Microsystems working with SoSyS AG, a Sun Advantage Partner based near Zurich, Switzerland. The bank determined that the Sun proposal offered the best price-performance. The team also liked features of the Solaris 10 Operating System, and were impressed by strong Sun references from other banks, including Nomura Bank’s own London office. As such, the Sun proposal was accepted.

The bank’s new infrastructure consists of high-performance Sun Fire V490 and Sun Fire V445 servers running the Solaris 10 OS. To address its storage needs and improve data transfer rates, Nomura deployed a storage area network (SAN) based on one scalable Sun StorageTek 6140 array and two high-capacity Sun StorageTek LTO 3 tape drives. To further enhance performance, the bank migrated from an Ingres database to Oracle Database 10g and upgraded their APSYS bank application from SunGard.

Deployment began on April 1, 2007 and was complete as planned by June 30, 2007. “When SoSyS or Sun promised something, they delivered on that promise 100 percent, whether it was the delivery of hardware or software, or the assignment of manpower,” says Werner F. Nöthe, vice president and head of IT at Nomura Bank (Switzerland) Ltd.

One of the most obvious differences between the bank’s new Solaris 10 OS-based environment and its previous Tru64 UNIX OS infrastructure is that Solaris is “dramatically faster and absolutely stable,” Nöthe adds. Bank employees and customers are experiencing up to tenfold faster system response times and backups are completed up to tenfold faster as well.

Data security and availability are also top priorities for Nomura. By using Sun solutions, the bank has enhanced its business continuity and availability. Financial data on the Sun Fire V490 server in Zurich is backed up locally. Data exports are sent to Geneva and imported into Geneva's Sun Fire V445 server.

In addition, storage administration at the bank has been simplified by the Zetabyte File System (ZFS) found in the Solaris 10 OS. With traditional storage volumes, storage is fragmented and stranded. ZFS creates a common storage pool, with no partitions to manage. It enables administrators to provision or grow storage, and add or remove a file system with a single, simple command instead of many complicated steps. The ZFS file system also safeguards data at the bank by running 64-bit checksums that detect and correct silent data corruption.

Five-year support from SoSyS AG completes the solution and is included in the contract at substantial savings compared to previous maintenance costs. By selecting Sun, Nomura is benefiting from enhanced system performance, increased fault tolerance, and greater scalability.

“The cooperation we experienced between Sun and its partner SoSyS was first class,” says Nöthe. “The installed solution has absolutely met or our expectations, or even exceeded them. We are confident that the system will serve us well beyond five years. We have not regretted for a single instant our choice of the SoSyS and Sun.”