Red Hat says the technology will help the bank maintain a resilient and secure network that scales based on business demands. The virtualised environment has helped lower costs by minimising the need for additional systems that require more energy and space, translating into a greener IT infrastructure.

Handelsbanken is using IBM's System z clustering technology, Parallel Sysplex, and the vendor's availability and disaster recovery offering to maintain operations for its 660 branch offices across Sweden, Great Britain and the Nordic countries.

IBM says the technology allows Handelsbanken to run its System z mainframes as powerful "clustered" servers that move new work requests to the available resources so that even planned or un-planned outages in multiple and distant data centres have little to no impact on business operations.

In addition to standardising its Linux systems on Red Hat Enterprise, Handelsbanken is also using the System z operating system, z/OS, to perform ongoing simplification features and health-checking mechanisms. Meanwhile, built-in automated reporting capabilities help Handelsbanken manage workloads and network traffic across its systems.

Roger Rydberg, technical manager, Handelsbanken, says: "System z servers are 'almost perfect' because of its availability and performance. It allows us to keep up with business climate changes because we can add or eliminate capacity any time based on customer demands. We can even make changes easily without having to stop any services."

Peter ter Laag, central data department, Handelsbanken, adds: "One of the main reasons for us to standardise our Linux environment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the ability to lower costs and use our IT personnel more effectively by leveraging the solution's integrated virtualisation functionality."