Overview
EBS Building Society, based in Dublin, Ireland, offers a broad range of banking, mortgage, saving and investment products. EBS employs approximately 600 people in its head office and branch network serving over 400,000 members. It is the fifth largest retail credit institution in Ireland with total assets under management of over €16 billion.
Challenge
EBS is a highly successful mutual society, attracting new savers, investors and borrowers. Each time the organisation creates new financial products, it typically introduces new applications to support them, including Internet banking services and other online tools. As a result of this continual innovation, EBS found that both the number of physical servers and the diversity of operating systems were increasing, with a consequent rise in complexity and cost of operation. Core banking systems run on the IBM System z mainframe platform, while most newer applications run on UNIX* servers – and the branch offices used both Linux- and Windows-based front-end applications. EBS wanted to rationalise its physical infrastructure, reducing the number of standalone servers to cut its management and maintenance costs, and reducing the total number of processors to cut software licensing fees.
Solution
EBS selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as its new strategic platform, running on the IBM z/VM operating system on an IBM System z mainframe. EBS can quickly and easily create a new Linux* virtual server for each new application, enabling the organisation to deliver new services cost-effectively in a standardised environment.
