With the goal of increasing performance and flexibility at a significantly lower cost in mind, the Bank teamed up with BEA Systems Inc., Intel Corp., MicrosoftMicrosoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Company to examine the cost-effectiveness of migrating a core mission-critical application, INFORM, an online information-delivery and transaction-processing system for the institutional investment community built on BEA WebLogic, from a RISC environment to a BEA, Intel, HPHP and Microsoft platform. Alles zu HP auf CIO.de Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

Goldstein explains the shift to the new platform: "The old IT infrastructure focused on the IT environment itself - keeping hardware and operating systems up, stable and running. The new IT model builds up on that, as well as on the fact that businesses are now defined by the effect they have on, and the value they add to, their customers. IT has to be tied to the business so that it can anticipate and adapt to changing business requirements dynamically - while reducing costs."

Goldstein adds that the RISC environment was also high-cost in terms of the actual cost of hardware and ongoing maintenance, layered software, and the implications for availability and upgrades. "Due to the high cost of the servers, applications are typically deployed over only two boxes. We need more flexible solutions to adapt to new business needs," he says.

Right On

Confirmation came with the results of porting the INFORM application from the RISC-based architecture to an Intel-based architecture. Goldstein says the latter offered improved price-performance metrics over the former. "Test results indicate that Intel provided a 78percent performance over the RISC architecture. While the RISC architecture was able to complete 21,253 total script iterations in 10minutes, Intel was able to complete 37,798. We also completed the price-performance evaluation. All things being equal, the BEA/Intel/HP solution demonstrated 70 percent higher transaction throughput, 50percent better response times and higher CPU utilisation," he adds. While offering better throughput and response, the Intel-based solution also offers significant cost savings of 46 percent over the RISC architecture, he says. The new platform used six HP ProliantDL580 G2 4-way servers with Intel Xeon processors MP, BEA WebLogic Server 7.0 as the application server upon which the test application was deployed, BEA JRockit as the Java Virtual Machine for the Intel-based system and Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server as the operating system.