Banca
Banca IFIS Banks on Actian Ingres Database for Big Savings and Scalability
Highlights
Banca IFIS is the only independent Italian bank specializing in financing enterprises. Committed to the development of new services for lending financial support and managing working capital, the bank helps thousands of enterprises every year find the appropriate solution to their financial needs.
Banca IFIS developed its core business application using Ingres Database and Ingres OpenROAD. When stricter Italian banking guidelines were imposed, Banca IFIS turned to Ingres to implement the next version of its products to ensure that they were ready to meet the rules that would ultimately provide a higher level of protection and security for its customers.
Challenge
Banca IFIS has grown substantially over the years and is now servicing the entire European market, including a number of Eastern European countries. Recently, new Italian banking regulations imposed a demand for a higher level of security and data protection. As a result, Banca IFIS had to make their core business application evolve in order to meet those new challenges.
One of the main issues Banca IFIS and Ingres faced was the limited time frame available to implement the new version of their application to meet the timeline given to the bank.
A third option TRG evaluated was the use of a specialized OLAP engine. While this type of engine would probably meet the analysts’ needs for interactivity, the implementation would require specialized OLAP skills and the existing ad hoc data access tools would not be able to interact directly with the OLAP environment.
Solution
In less than one year, the following had to be delivered:
- Cost effective and scalable solution
- Fully unicode enabled database and application in order to effectively support Banca IFIS expansion, including eastern European character sets
- High availability
- Secured infrastructure fulfilling disaster recovery targets imposed by new banking regulations
Solution
Ingres Operational Services task force and Banca IFIS IT personnel delivered the project working closely with the Ingres Engineering staff.
The new version of Banca IFIS’ application was installed on the latest releases of Ingres solutions, using the Ingres Icebreaker Appliance for the operating system and database backend and Ingres OpenROAD and Ingres OpenROAD Application Server for the unicode enabled applications. The appliance is deployed inside a virtualized infrastructure, allowing for scalability and reliability.
High availability was achieved by leveraging this new architecture design and the proactive assistance received from the Ingres Operational Services team. This ensured a smooth implementation and helped avoid costly service interruptions.
A disaster recovery plan was rolled out with the support of HVR middleware from PSB, enabling real time data synchronization across remote sites.
Results
The open source model and full engagement by the Ingres technical team ensured that the project was delivered on time.
Ingres Icebreaker enabled a low cost, simplified installation of Ingres Database. It is the first fully integrated enterprise-class database and Linux operating system with an intelligent online patching mechanism. In addition, administrative tasks are simplified with an easy-to-use consolidated management portal.
The Banca IFIS application is now used by its employees across Europe, in their own language and character sets, thanks to full UTF-8 support. While the number of users is increasing, the application’s availability and performance have been observed to be evenbetter than ever. Banca IFIS now benefits from this new architecture that gives the company a perfect foundation for extending the application’s features to its business needs.
“As a financial institution with high growth, we were looking for a solution that would lower total cost of ownership, increase reliability, and would scale with our growing amount of data,” said Carlo Sirombo, Director of the Organization at Banca IFIS. “Ingres was the right solution for us. In tough economic times like these, the ability to build applications that support the many languages used in Europe with an open source database helps us keep costs low and provide better service to our customers. Because Ingres Database has the security, reliability, high availability, and enterprise features typically found only in propriety databases, we can build and deploy mission critical financial applications on Ingres with confidence.”