Case Study
GE MONEY
BANK SCALES IT
INFRASTRUCTURE FOR BUSINESS
GROWTH WITH RED HAT ENTERPRISE
LINUX AND VIRTUALIZATION
Fast Facts
Customer: GE Money Bank
Industry: Financial Services
Geography: Czech Republic
Red Hat Premier Partner: Enlogit
Business Challenge: Needed to consolidate its technology infrastructure in order to scale with business growth and
reduce dependency on high-end hardware and space resources for mission-critical operations
Migration path: Sun Solaris on SPARC servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated virtualization on AMD
Opteron-based servers
Solution: GE Money deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform on commodity hardware to consolidate its
applications, the company then utilized Red Hat virtualization and clustering technology for further system consolidation
with the help of Red Hat Consulting
Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform including integrated virtualization, clustering, and file system
technologies, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Consulting Oracle DB, IBM Websphere, and Apache webservers
Hardware: AMD Opteron-based servers : x4100, x4200, x4600, x4440, x4140, v20z and v40z servers
Benefits: Increased operational flexibility, security, and reliability for its mission-critical infrastructure; reduced
space required for servers by approximately 60%; scaled IT infrastructure for continued business growth
BACKGROUND
GE Money Bank is one of the largest financial institutions in the Czech Republic. It is a full-service bank with an
extensive network of branches and ATMs. It focuses both on retail clients and small and medium-sized enterprises.
GE Money Bank is a subsidiary of GE Capital, the global finance unit of General Electric, offering financial solutions to
customers in 26 countries worldwide.
The bank boasts a continuously increasing number of
clients, upwards of 960,000 with over 220 branch
offices, and an ATM network of more than 600 machines.
As a result, the bank focuses on providing easily
accessible, simple, and beneficial products through
continuous innovation.
GE Money Bank was the first large bank in the Czech
Republic to introduce services such as a full-fledged
electronic statement of account, communication with
clients through a secured instant messenger, and the
unique analytical addition to its Internet Bank, which
allows clients to have control over their income and
expenditures and to plan their budgets.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Due to the huge amount of critical data being passed
through the GE Money network, performance, reliability,
and low latency are business-critical. As the bank’s
customer base grew, alongside the amount of services
offered, the organisation’s technology infrastructure grew
as well. The result was a huge a number of applications
running on high-end, disparate servers. Not only was this
expensive, both from a space and hardware perspective,
but it was also becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
The team at GE Money recognized that in order to reduce
any future technology shortfalls, it needed to review its
technology infrastructure. The bank carried out a
benchmarking exercise with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and
Sun Solaris on Intel, AMD and IBM hardware.
Red Hat performed well in comparison to the alternatives
in regard to virtualization, performance, reliability, and
the provisioning of a centralised management system.
With these results, GE Money decided that Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and its integrated virtualization and
clustering technology would help to alleviate its technology
challenges.
SOLUTION
Initially, GE Money rolled out Red Hat Enterprise
Linux Advanced Platform on commodity hardware and
consolidated all of its applications onto a standard
platform. Once the benefits of the standalone system were
recognised, the Bank then looked to Red Hat virtualization
and clustering technology for further system consolidation.
During the deployment process, Red Hat also impressed
GE Money with its level of consulting expertise.
Understanding that the move to a virtualized environment
with minimal disruption and adhering to the level of
service that is critical to a high transaction environment,
GE Money utilized Red Hat Consulting services to help
with the migration.
“We recognized that virtualization technology was crucial
to the consolidation and high-performance gains that a
business such as ours required,” said Pavel Bartos, lead
analyst IT infrastructure, GE Money Bank.”
“Red Hat came with a package of related benefits,
in comparison to the competition. Not only was the
technology impressive, but Red Hat Consulting’s local
experience backed by Enlogit, a Czech Republic Red Hat
Premier Partner, gave us peace of mind during roll out,”
said Bartos.
“Our team of technicians were already comfortable
developing and working within a Linux environment.
Not only did this mean that we could up-skill relatively
simply, but we also could channel the investment usually
required for internal training into additional solutions and
functionality for our clients.”
BENEFITS
Most importantly, GE Money benefited from the flexibility
that virtualized environments provide, running multiple
operating systems and providing a framework for future
applications with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
“We now have the foundation
on which our organization
can thrive without facing
the challenge of huge server
rooms, maintaining expensive
hardware, or relying on thirdparty, proprietary vendors to
keep us up and running. Red Hat
Enterprise Linux with integrated
virtualization was implemented
with no impact to the wider
business or our customers.”
– Pavel Bartos
Lead Analyst IT Infrastructure
With the new solution, when servers need to be created
there is no need to wait for additional hardware to be
ordered as servers can be created on demand. At this time,
more than 25 percent of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux
servers are virtualized.
As with any financial institution, cost savings and customer
service are at the heart of any technology exercise. GE
Money eliminated license fees, witnessed increased
reliability, and now runs on an infrastructure that can be
more easily maintained.
Bartos continued, “This frees up our internal resource to
focus on value-add services to our expanding customer
base. Innovation is at the heart of our business, and
this project has focused up our time and investment to
provision additional services on an infrastructure that can
grow with the business. Currently we have more than 250
Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers operating in our test and
production environments and this number is still growing.”
In the near future, GE Money plans to implement Red
Hat Directory Server to simplify and automate user
management and maintenance. GE Money recognises
the security benefits associated with Red Hat Directory
Server as administrators have the ability to control policy
management and access rights across its multiple UNIX
and AIX management systems.
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