Financial Services Leader Expands and Innovates with HP Integrity Servers and Linux
Fiserv Investment Support Services (Fiserv ISS), one of the largest trustees of self-directed retirement plans in the U.S., recently adopted an Itanium 2–based HP Integrity server platform equipped with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and an Oracle® Database 10g with Oracle Real Application Clusters to process its customers’ financial data. Nearly five times as fast as the company’s former mainframe-based RISC platform, the Integrity server environment enables Fiserv ISS to exceed ever faster and more complex client service-level agreement (SLA) requirements and enhance the quality, agility, and efficiency of its services while reducing hardware and software costs.
The Denver-based company, which administers more than 320,000 retirement and custodial accounts valued at nearly $34.7 billion, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fiserv, Inc., ranked by the FinTech 100 Survey of American Banker and Financial Insights as the world’s largest supplier of IT services to the financial services industry.
Fiserv ISS [www.fiserviss.com] was formed in 2004 to unite four top trust companies—First Trust Corporation, Lincoln Trust Company, Resources Trust Company, and Retirement Accounts, Inc.—all former Fiserv, Inc. subsidiaries. Fiserv ISS provides a rich portfolio of trust, custodial, and back-office services. Its offerings include investment administration for registered investment advisors, third-party administrator services for large record-keepers, and outsourcing solutions for financial institutions. Innovating in both business processes and technologies, Fiserv ISS is enhancing the quality, agility, and efficiency of its services to financial intermediaries.
Fiserv ISS has adopted a next-generation, 64-bit HP Integrity server platform to run the core operation underlying all of its businesses—the processing and management of its customers’ financial data. The company’s 28-terabyte data repository will expand by the end of 2005 to 50 terabytes, with 80 percent of that data residing in the Integrity server environment.
Based on Intel Itanium 2 processors, the highavailability Fiserv ISS configuration comprises eight 2-way HP Integrity rx2600 Servers equipped with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and an Oracle Database 10g with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). HP Services consulting helped Fiserv ISS to design and install the new environment and then to transition its databases to the platform.
“Running on Integrity servers, our database processing is up to fivefold faster than on our former mainframe-based RISC platform,” says Jeff Knight, vice president of technology and vendor relations at Fiserv ISS. “Hour-long processes now take three minutes. A 24-hour database load is now down to one hour. The performance gain enables us to meet the ever-faster SLA requirements of our customers.
“Information is key to our customers’ world,” continues Knight. “They push us daily to deliver new tools and services that they can in turn offer to their clients. Our ability to fulfill these requests is critical to our customers’ success—and ours. HP helped us to take a quantum leap with new technologies that support our customer needs today and prepare us for tomorrow. With Integrity servers, we have a nimble foundation to handle changing market trends and client requirements. While reducing our hardware and software costs, our Integrity environment enables us to keep pace with increased transactional activity and deliver better services, faster, to our customers.”
IT environment combines standards-based economy with business-critical performance Based on the 64-bit Intel Itanium architecture, HP Integrity servers combine the economy of a standards-based, non-proprietary platform with the robust performance required by an always-on financial services business.
“Itanium-based Integrity servers were head-and-shoulders above the other options out there, offering faster processing speed at a lower cost per cycle,” says Knight. “Because of their greater processing capability, we use fewer processors and as a result, we pay less for software licensing.”
The scalability of the Integrity server configuration enables Fiserv ISS to size its investment to evolving business needs. “We can scale up and down with transaction volume,” says Knight, “HP Integrity servers enable us to run multiple applications in the same environment, add processors to a server, or expand the cluster with more servers.”
When re-architecting its core database environment, Fiserv ISS had to be sure that its new platform could meet multiple needs, including the high availability requirements of its business-critical operation.
The company adopted next-generation technologies by working with its trusted IT provider, HP. For almost 15 years, HP has been serving both Fiserv ISS and its parent company, Fiserv, Inc. Integrity servers are not the only HP systems at Fiserv ISS. The company also employs more than 190 HP ProLiant servers running the Microsoft® Windows® operating system as Web, networking, and application server—and manages these systems with HP OpenView Network Node Manager and HP Systems Insight Manager management applications.
“Bringing us its track record in the financial services industry and relationships with other leading IT providers,” says Knight, “HP helped us define an architecture that meets our needs today and in the future. HP Services consultants were critical to our success. They understood our business and provided expertise in Red Hat Linux and Oracle technologies as well as the HP environment. We worked with HP, Oracle, and Intel as a team to plan, develop, and deploy our production environment.”
Exploiting Oracle RAC security and clustering features, the Integrity server configuration supports both disastertolerant failover with 99.99 percent uptime and a multi-layered security strategy.
Now, Fiserv ISS is extending the robust performance of Integrity servers beyond its database operations. “Today we have a heterogeneous IT environment with solutions from multiple vendors,” says Knight. “We’re working to tighten that up. Because of the cost-effectiveness of the HP servers, we’ve implemented the same Integrity environment for testing and development as well as production, which streamlines deployment of the new services that our customers demand.”
Driven to exceed SLAs—and customer expectations Fiserv ISS supports the needs of financial professionals and their clients by offering specialized administrative services for individual and business retirement plans. The company provides account statements; performs IRS-required reporting on contributions, distributions, and year-end account value; and makes plan distributions upon request.
“Our business is financial data management,” says John Price, vice president, IS operations, Fiserv ISS. “We receive, transform, and deliver financial data to our customers how and when they want it.”
By increasing the breadth and depth of its products and services for financial intermediaries, Fiserv ISS intends to be even more productive for its customers, who can capitalize on the efficiency of one-stop shopping for solutions tailored to their businesses.
“Fiserv ISS achieved double-digit growth last year,” Price says. “We plan to continue expanding at this rate. We’re making a lot of back-end infrastructure changes. Our customers are counting on us to perform increasingly complex transactions in ever-shorter cycles. We no longer have the luxury of a full night to process data as we did in the old days of the mainframe. Our nightly windows are shrinking all the time.
“Meanwhile, we’re working with ever-higher volumes of data,” Price continues. “Just a decade ago, we were talking megabytes of data. Now, we’re running multiterabyte databases. Integrity servers are our platform for back-end database processing. Our previous large-scale UNIX platforms weren’t up to the job. We migrated successfully and achieved huge performance gains. HP Integrity servers scale effectively to meet growing customer demand. Now, we’re exceeding our SLAs.”
Driving Fiserv ISS innovations is a company-wide focus on its customers’ success, a value that the company also finds in HP. “HP is more than just a hardware supplier,” says Price. “It’s a company that cares about our success. HP provides our data processing environment, the tools that monitor our network, the servers that power our Web services and the know-how to help us deliver the absolutely best service we can to our customers.”
Extending IT value from core operations to the edge of the network By standardizing database operations on a single platform, Fiserv ISS has reduced the cost and complexity of ongoing service and support. “Consolidating database servers has given us welcome relief from server sprawl,” Price says. “Our transition to the HP Integrity platform replaced multiple database architectures with a very few systems and increased performance while lowering cost of ownership. With one very reliable platform, we don’t have to hire tons of people to take care of hundreds of servers. And we have fewer points of failure.”
The clustered HP Integrity server environment also enables the IT team to perform maintenance without disrupting production, an asset as SLAs extend operations around the clock. “My administrators no longer need to work all night,” says Price.
Fiserv ISS anticipates further efficiencies by extending its HP Integrity servers beyond core database operations. “We are a heterogeneous outfit with many different environments for our various channels of business,” says Price. “Having them all interoperate together effectively is probably the biggest challenge we face today. Many of our system and database administrators have skills in Linux and they’ve fallen in love with the Integrity platform. We’re starting to put it out to our edge databasesbecause it is so cost-effective and greatly increases processing power across all tiers of our architecture.
“HP was the first to really embrace the Itanium-based platform,” concludes Price. “HP helped us understand what it could do for us and worked with us every step of the way as we adopted it. Now, I don’t have to focus on the underlying hardware infrastructure. With the HP Integrity solution, I can concentrate on taking care of my customers.”
© 2005 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered U.S. trademark of Oracle Corporation, Redwood City, California.
4AA0-0798ENW, 06/2005
The Denver-based company, which administers more than 320,000 retirement and custodial accounts valued at nearly $34.7 billion, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fiserv, Inc., ranked by the FinTech 100 Survey of American Banker and Financial Insights as the world’s largest supplier of IT services to the financial services industry.
Fiserv ISS [www.fiserviss.com] was formed in 2004 to unite four top trust companies—First Trust Corporation, Lincoln Trust Company, Resources Trust Company, and Retirement Accounts, Inc.—all former Fiserv, Inc. subsidiaries. Fiserv ISS provides a rich portfolio of trust, custodial, and back-office services. Its offerings include investment administration for registered investment advisors, third-party administrator services for large record-keepers, and outsourcing solutions for financial institutions. Innovating in both business processes and technologies, Fiserv ISS is enhancing the quality, agility, and efficiency of its services to financial intermediaries.
Fiserv ISS has adopted a next-generation, 64-bit HP Integrity server platform to run the core operation underlying all of its businesses—the processing and management of its customers’ financial data. The company’s 28-terabyte data repository will expand by the end of 2005 to 50 terabytes, with 80 percent of that data residing in the Integrity server environment.
Based on Intel Itanium 2 processors, the highavailability Fiserv ISS configuration comprises eight 2-way HP Integrity rx2600 Servers equipped with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and an Oracle Database 10g with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). HP Services consulting helped Fiserv ISS to design and install the new environment and then to transition its databases to the platform.
“Running on Integrity servers, our database processing is up to fivefold faster than on our former mainframe-based RISC platform,” says Jeff Knight, vice president of technology and vendor relations at Fiserv ISS. “Hour-long processes now take three minutes. A 24-hour database load is now down to one hour. The performance gain enables us to meet the ever-faster SLA requirements of our customers.
“Information is key to our customers’ world,” continues Knight. “They push us daily to deliver new tools and services that they can in turn offer to their clients. Our ability to fulfill these requests is critical to our customers’ success—and ours. HP helped us to take a quantum leap with new technologies that support our customer needs today and prepare us for tomorrow. With Integrity servers, we have a nimble foundation to handle changing market trends and client requirements. While reducing our hardware and software costs, our Integrity environment enables us to keep pace with increased transactional activity and deliver better services, faster, to our customers.”
IT environment combines standards-based economy with business-critical performance Based on the 64-bit Intel Itanium architecture, HP Integrity servers combine the economy of a standards-based, non-proprietary platform with the robust performance required by an always-on financial services business.
“Itanium-based Integrity servers were head-and-shoulders above the other options out there, offering faster processing speed at a lower cost per cycle,” says Knight. “Because of their greater processing capability, we use fewer processors and as a result, we pay less for software licensing.”
The scalability of the Integrity server configuration enables Fiserv ISS to size its investment to evolving business needs. “We can scale up and down with transaction volume,” says Knight, “HP Integrity servers enable us to run multiple applications in the same environment, add processors to a server, or expand the cluster with more servers.”
When re-architecting its core database environment, Fiserv ISS had to be sure that its new platform could meet multiple needs, including the high availability requirements of its business-critical operation.
The company adopted next-generation technologies by working with its trusted IT provider, HP. For almost 15 years, HP has been serving both Fiserv ISS and its parent company, Fiserv, Inc. Integrity servers are not the only HP systems at Fiserv ISS. The company also employs more than 190 HP ProLiant servers running the Microsoft® Windows® operating system as Web, networking, and application server—and manages these systems with HP OpenView Network Node Manager and HP Systems Insight Manager management applications.
“Bringing us its track record in the financial services industry and relationships with other leading IT providers,” says Knight, “HP helped us define an architecture that meets our needs today and in the future. HP Services consultants were critical to our success. They understood our business and provided expertise in Red Hat Linux and Oracle technologies as well as the HP environment. We worked with HP, Oracle, and Intel as a team to plan, develop, and deploy our production environment.”
Exploiting Oracle RAC security and clustering features, the Integrity server configuration supports both disastertolerant failover with 99.99 percent uptime and a multi-layered security strategy.
Now, Fiserv ISS is extending the robust performance of Integrity servers beyond its database operations. “Today we have a heterogeneous IT environment with solutions from multiple vendors,” says Knight. “We’re working to tighten that up. Because of the cost-effectiveness of the HP servers, we’ve implemented the same Integrity environment for testing and development as well as production, which streamlines deployment of the new services that our customers demand.”
Driven to exceed SLAs—and customer expectations Fiserv ISS supports the needs of financial professionals and their clients by offering specialized administrative services for individual and business retirement plans. The company provides account statements; performs IRS-required reporting on contributions, distributions, and year-end account value; and makes plan distributions upon request.
“Our business is financial data management,” says John Price, vice president, IS operations, Fiserv ISS. “We receive, transform, and deliver financial data to our customers how and when they want it.”
By increasing the breadth and depth of its products and services for financial intermediaries, Fiserv ISS intends to be even more productive for its customers, who can capitalize on the efficiency of one-stop shopping for solutions tailored to their businesses.
“Fiserv ISS achieved double-digit growth last year,” Price says. “We plan to continue expanding at this rate. We’re making a lot of back-end infrastructure changes. Our customers are counting on us to perform increasingly complex transactions in ever-shorter cycles. We no longer have the luxury of a full night to process data as we did in the old days of the mainframe. Our nightly windows are shrinking all the time.
“Meanwhile, we’re working with ever-higher volumes of data,” Price continues. “Just a decade ago, we were talking megabytes of data. Now, we’re running multiterabyte databases. Integrity servers are our platform for back-end database processing. Our previous large-scale UNIX platforms weren’t up to the job. We migrated successfully and achieved huge performance gains. HP Integrity servers scale effectively to meet growing customer demand. Now, we’re exceeding our SLAs.”
Driving Fiserv ISS innovations is a company-wide focus on its customers’ success, a value that the company also finds in HP. “HP is more than just a hardware supplier,” says Price. “It’s a company that cares about our success. HP provides our data processing environment, the tools that monitor our network, the servers that power our Web services and the know-how to help us deliver the absolutely best service we can to our customers.”
Extending IT value from core operations to the edge of the network By standardizing database operations on a single platform, Fiserv ISS has reduced the cost and complexity of ongoing service and support. “Consolidating database servers has given us welcome relief from server sprawl,” Price says. “Our transition to the HP Integrity platform replaced multiple database architectures with a very few systems and increased performance while lowering cost of ownership. With one very reliable platform, we don’t have to hire tons of people to take care of hundreds of servers. And we have fewer points of failure.”
The clustered HP Integrity server environment also enables the IT team to perform maintenance without disrupting production, an asset as SLAs extend operations around the clock. “My administrators no longer need to work all night,” says Price.
Fiserv ISS anticipates further efficiencies by extending its HP Integrity servers beyond core database operations. “We are a heterogeneous outfit with many different environments for our various channels of business,” says Price. “Having them all interoperate together effectively is probably the biggest challenge we face today. Many of our system and database administrators have skills in Linux and they’ve fallen in love with the Integrity platform. We’re starting to put it out to our edge databasesbecause it is so cost-effective and greatly increases processing power across all tiers of our architecture.
“HP was the first to really embrace the Itanium-based platform,” concludes Price. “HP helped us understand what it could do for us and worked with us every step of the way as we adopted it. Now, I don’t have to focus on the underlying hardware infrastructure. With the HP Integrity solution, I can concentrate on taking care of my customers.”
© 2005 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered U.S. trademark of Oracle Corporation, Redwood City, California.
4AA0-0798ENW, 06/2005
