Blade Runner

As part of an initiative to adopt open systems and increase business flexibility, Commerzbank North America, a subsidiary of Commerzbank (Frankfurt; $484 billion in assets), deployed Egenera's (Marlboro, Mass.) BladeFrame systems at the bank's New York data center for migrating Unix applications to Linux and Microsoft (Redmond, Wash.) Windows. Commerzbank selected BladeFrame for its business continuity capabilities, according to Rich Arenaro, VP of information technology.

"We needed to be more resilient with disaster recovery and we are close to the World Trade Center, so we were impacted by that," says Arenaro. "There was no server infrastructure that provided that, so we chose Egenera." BladeFrame features full redundancy of all system components, according to Egenera.

Commerzbank also considered BladeFrame's support for Red Hat (Raleigh, N.C.) Linux, SUSE LINUX and Microsoft Windows to be an advantage, notes Arenaro. And all three operating systems can run concurrently on a single BladeFrame, according to the bank.

Also, with space at a premium, Commerzbank sought to reduce server count while simultaneously increasing processing capacity. The Egenera system reduced floor-space requirements by 90 percent while tripling capacity, Arenaro relates. "This model better leverages those assets," he says.