Solaris 10 : The Next-Generation Platform for Financial Services
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Nov 2005
Solaris 10 : The Next-Generation Platform for Financial Services Sun has built advanced, innovative technologies into the new Solaris 10 Operating System, providing fast, operationally resilient performance that can help financial services organizations address their key business and IT infrastructure issues. Providing increased customer value at a lower cost is essential for financial services organizations of every description to win and retain customers in today's highly competitive environment. Improving customer service levels, protecting existing technology investments and reducing day-to-day IT operating costs are all necessary to improve competitiveness and increase shareholder value. Financial services organizations of every description are feeling the full pressure of competitive forces, and need to win and retain customers through increased value at lower cost. Additionally, a vast array of new regulations across the globe is driving compliance to the top of the agenda with major implications for the supporting technology infrastructure, which must enable accurate, timely and controlled financial management. To improve customer service levels and open up new business opportunities, financial services organizations must deliver the right information to the right people at the right time, with the highest levels of security and privacy controls. At the same time, to protect existing technology investments and even reduce day-to-day IT operating costs, financial services organizations need to ensure they take advantage of the technology industry's most advanced offerings in procurement and management. Challenges for Every Financial Market Sector Capital Markets The trade lifecycle of securities is undergoing fundamental change. The market infrastructure continues to edge towards straight-through processing (STP), and trade execution is now global, reflecting both choice of liquidity and increasingly global investment strategies. Additionally, compliance is now a primary concern, given the velocity and value inherent in capital markets. From Sarbanes-Oxley, through the Patriot Act and Basel II, to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MFID), organizations must ensure regulatory compliance even as they build new, cost-effective infrastructures. Corporate Banking Corporate banking institutions face pressure from global competition and ongoing market consolidation. In the search for new revenue streams, corporate banks need to quickly introduce new products and customer services. And in the wake of a wave of mergers, IT infrastructures must be consolidated and streamlined. Retail Banking Retail banking institutions are fighting to retain customers and increase revenues by offering new value-added services and improved overall service. Customer demand for online access and web-based services means that retail banks must introduce new IT capabilities, while raising availability and security levels of their networks. Insurance The insurance sector is facing its own challenges in improving customer focus through effective data mining to deliver tailored, customer-centric products and services. Product innovation and time to-market are both critical for success. At the same time, organizations need to streamline internal operations and workflows, particularly as they apply to policy service and claims, while also providing their distribution channels with secure, always-on access to company systems and services.
Advanced Technology Support for Business Demands Sun has built advanced, innovative technologies into the new Solaris 10 Operating System, providing fast, operationally resilient performance that can help financial services organizations across the board address their key business and IT infrastructure issues. Unparalleled Security It is imperative that online connectivity is totally protected at all times, to ensure financial institutions and their clients are safeguarded from today's serious threats to systems and privacy. The Solaris 10 OS includes unparalleled security enhancements to deliver protection that more than meets the most stringent business demands. The Solaris 10 OS provides the foundation for a secure and integrated identity solution, including single sign-on capability and detailed User and Process Rights Management, to control access to the network infrastructure and enable the deployment of secure web services and portals. To help meet regulatory requirements, the Solaris 10 OS includes extensive certified audit capabilities for logging changes and strong password support. For additional end-to-end data security and audit controls, the award-winning Trusted Solaris OS exceeds the strictest requirements for data privacy, accountability and security. Moving forward, these "trusted" features will increasingly become part of Sun's standard offering, providing a strategic roadmap at the forefront of the market's ability to address security issues. Relentless Availability With ever-increasing demand for online services and the onset of globalization, financial services organizations must provide 24x7 access to customers, partners and employees alike. In addition to existing technologies such as Sun Cluster and Dynamic Reconfiguration, new Solaris 10 OS features are designed to provide the highest levels of availability and service recovery for mission-critical applications. These technologies include: Solaris Containers to isolate applications and services, virtually eliminating error propagation, unauthorized access, and unintentional intrusions. Because resources are isolated and dedicated to a Solaris Container and its applications rather than a complete system, highly efficient application consolidation is now possible. Predictive Self-Healing to automatically diagnose, isolate, and recover from many hardware and application faults ZFS, a new dynamic file system that delivers "19 9s" worth of automatic data integrity Extreme Performance and Scalability Higher trading volumes in capital markets require ever faster processing times to identify and hit trading opportunities. Additionally, demand for global risk management, especially credit risk, requires massive data management scalability to enable institutions to handle the increased workloads. To meet these demands, the Solaris 10 OS includes:A new, re-designed TCP/IP stack, providing better networking performance for online, real-time transaction processing, and special optimizations for multi-threaded processors and x86 architectures DTrace, a real-time diagnostic engine, to enhance application performance by pinpointing exactly where the bottlenecks are ZFS, the world's first 128-bit file system, offering virtually unlimited scalability with 16 billion, billion times greater capacity than existing solutions The performance benefits of the Solaris 10 OS are being demonstrated by organizations across the financial services sector. At one financial services company, the Sun Java System Application Server on the Solaris 10 OS runs more than twice as fast as IBM WebSphere on Linux. On another financial services application, Sun Studio 9 software on Solaris 10 OS outperforms open source compilers on Linux, delivering a 63% increase in transactions per second. Reduced Costs To improve competitiveness and value to shareholders, financial services organizations need to deliver greater value, through improved efficiency and lower operating costs. The Solaris 10 OS offers the opportunity to reduce the complexity and cost of IT infrastructures, protect existing IT investments, and relieve pressure on margins, through: Optimal utilization: With Solaris Containers, system and network resources can be allocated and controlled on a fine-grained basis, helping simplify computing infrastructures and improving resource utilization. As a result, organizations can better consolidate applications onto fewer servers without concern for resource constraints Linux interoperability: The Solaris Linux Application Environment (LAE) allows Linux applications to run unmodified on the Solaris 10 OS when coupled with a Linux distribution. This enables financial services organizations to take advantage of the innovations in Solaris 10 OS without sacrificing investments in existing Linux applications Integrated services: Integrated security, directory and file system features are included in the Solaris 10 OS at no extra cost A low-cost acquisition model: the Solaris 10 OS license is free and customers can choose the right support service to match their needs Platform flexibility: the Solaris 10 OS is the only industrial-grade UNIX OS available on SPARC, x64 and x86 platforms. This enables organizations to leverage the benefits and flexibility of low-cost hardware yet standardize on a single operating system enterprise-wide. It also provides greater design choice while reducing management and training costs Whatever the functional scenario, the Solaris 10 OS can optimize the capital costs for the supporting infrastructure, while ensuring a match with prudent management of operational risk, through a thoroughly tested environment. |
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