BankingTop-5 Vietnamese Commercial Bank
Consolidating core banking from 14 x86 servers down to 2 IBM Power10 clusters
Cut 5-year TCO by 38%, raised core SLA to 99.995% and reduced end-of-day batch time from 4 hours to 78 minutes.
−38%
5-year TCO
99.995%
Core banking SLA
78 min
EOD batch (from: 4h)
0
Severe incidents in 12 months
01 · Challenge
Challenge
After 6 years on fragmented x86 infrastructure, the bank's EOD batch ran for 4 hours and routinely encroached on the early-morning service window. Oracle license cost was spiralling with x86 core count. A hardware incident in late 2024 caused a 47-minute Internet Banking outage — pushing the infrastructure problem to the top of the priority list.
02 · Solution
Solution
- 01Audited all workloads and classified by tier (core OLTP, reporting, dev/test).
- 02Designed an active-active two-cluster Power10 architecture with cross-DC Live Partition Mobility.
- 03Migrated core database to Power; kept analytics and dev/test on existing x86.
- 04Optimised Oracle licensing: from 224 vCPU x86 (112 licensed cores) down to 48 Power cores.
- 05Established a DR site synchronised via HADR with RPO < 5 minutes.
03 · Outcome
Outcome
- Total 5-year cost dropped ~$2.1M, primarily from Oracle license savings.
- EOD batch completes before 03:00, opening branches 2 hours earlier.
- Core service SLA at 99.995% — exceeding the 99.99% commitment.
- No S1/S2 incidents in the first 12 months after go-live.
Tech Stack
IBM Power10AIX 7.3Oracle DB EEPowerVMHADRIBM FlashSystem
