Inside ANZ
A bank or the original Starship Enterprise?
We may have our head in the Cloud nowadays but banks used to have their own technology weather systems. Spot anyone or anything you recognise in this video?
MAINFRAME - ANZ'S ENGINE OF TRUST
22 Jun 2023
“ANZ’s time to deploy new zSystems technology is best in class, enabling ANZ to rapidly take advantage of new technology capabilities.” - Jose Castano Vice President Worldwide Sales IBM zSystems®
Sitting quietly in ANZ’s secure, temperature-controlled data centres are the four Australian ANZ zSystem® mainframes. Underpinning ANZ customer accounts, powering apps, protecting customers and keeping the bank running.
It’s with confidence I say the mainframe is ANZ’s engine of trust, sitting at the heart of ANZ’s banking landscape. As the technology world shifts, the mainframe perfectly blends with ANZ’s cloud transition and integrates into modern customer services, processing up to 30 million transactions a day and dealing with some of ANZ’s most demanding workloads.
(L-R) Ken Hewitt (IBM), Seamus Quinn (IBM), David Squires (ANZ), Paul Cavanagh (IBM), Anthony Edwards (ANZ), Chris Melican (IBM)
Building on our Reputation
We have built a reputation as having one of the best-in-class mainframe environments, as acknowledged by IBM in a 2022 case study - Boosting banking resiliency in Australia. We have won industry awards and showcased our achievements at global conferences.
IBM recognised our abilities and engaged us to help develop new innovations, based on our customer requirements to further enhance our resilience and flexibility.
Recently we demonstrated this resilience and flexibility by upgrading our fleet to z16 mainframes in 12 weeks – with no issues or unscheduled outages. The speed of this upgrade impressed IBM and made our peers take notice. We’re now running the newest, fastest, most resilient and best tech available.
Our customers wouldn’t know these activities are underway – and we prefer it that way. People are busy enough and shouldn’t have to worry about banking mainframes.
A key to our success is customer trust. We have built this trust by delivering what we said we would deliver – from our regular software lifecycles, to adding functionality and other innovations. The addition of our site swap function has provided our customers with further assurance.
We upgrade the secondary site, move test systems rapidly into that environment, perform testing, benchmarking and ensure a robust environment without any risks to our customers.
Once completed, we simply site swap and perform the same activity again. In truth we can run the bank’s mainframe operations with just one mainframe. But with two at each site we can guarantee trust through physical redundancy – and sleep well at night.
The Future
The mainframe environment never stands still and continues to focus on modernising applications into a hybrid cloud environment. Using a mix of both mainframe and cloud in a highly flexible, secure and scalable ecosystem provides the best customer experience.
This ensures ANZ's core systems will keep pace with modern engineering, coding, security and reliability techniques. The z16 mainframes provide the latest technology and performance.
It never ceases to amaze me how incredible these machines are. It’s exciting to work with some of the best people in the industry ensuring our mainframe hardware remains among the most modern in the world.
David Squires, Senior Mainframe Engineer at ANZ
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