Paragon Software optimized virtual infrastructure of Commerzbank

One of the large-scale bank concerns of Europe – the Commerzbank – conducts the activity in financial market since 1870, rendering all types of commercial services for physical persons and legal entities. Today more than 8 million corporate clients in 40 countries of the world use credit programs of bank, implementing the tasks and requirements on business developments. For successful data asset management in the company modern IT infrastructure with runtime allocation of physical resources on different remote platforms is built. More than sixty percent of all hardware are consolidated and combined with the help of technology of virtualization under control of VMware ESX Server where at the expense of the released resources 20 crucial servers with continuous loading are deployed.

Due to the increase in loading of the existing infrastructure to IT specialists of bank the task of optimization of speed of operation of all virtual machines due to alignment of sections in the VMDK files which are stored on VMFS server volumes and also a task of performance improvement of the storage area network (SAN) due to alignment of sections concerning tracks was set.

From an analysis result of a situation and consideration of the existing software solutions for interaction with virtual environments and data management at the level of sectors and sections it was selected by software of Paragon Partition Manager 10 Server. Existence of the technical license for the program providing its reuse after acquisition in all existing infrastructure of the company without any additional costs became the important factor which influenced this solution.

For accomplishment of all transactions the image of the boot carrier with the special version of the program was used. After its assembling management tools the server of VMware of ESX, from it performed loading of each virtual machine. Partition Manager 10 Server allows to move partitions with data into the necessary number of sectors and to increase the cluster size of the file system, both by the real physical machine, and in virtual for a small time frame. Transactions over virtual machines were considerably accelerated due to reuse of in advance prepared scenario of a program runtime in the form of the scripting file. After loading of an image the program automatically executed all transactions, based on the set command list.

Use of the Paragon Partition Manager 10 Server program on the terms of acquisition of the technical license allowed to solve quickly problems with alignment of sections, both in the storage area network, and on virtual machines. Due to acceleration of data access performance of all infrastructure increased and load of the hardware decreased that finally allowed the company to increase the computing power of the storage area network with increase in the working virtual machines without additional capital costs.