Banorte Financial Group

In 2008, Banorte Financial Group faced several production issues along its mainframe’s Logical Partitions (LPARs) that were negatively affecting operations and productivity experience, as well as leaving the company vulnerable to regulatory infractions. LPARs are individual systems created by dividing a mainframe processor’s memory and storage into multiple sets of resources. Each of these resources manages different functions within an operation. An LPAR’s size and speed are determined by the system’s Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS). The larger the output needed from a particular LPAR, the more MIPS would need to be added. The problem? Banorte was still operating with an outdated monitoring system consisting of Excel spreadsheets to identify workloads and estimate MIPS. An inadequate overview of the company’s LPARs led to CPU bottlenecks that could halt operations and lead to delays or late completion of batch processing—making the jobs of Banorte IT staff more difficult and potentially leading to negative impacts for Banorte’s internal users. The lack of transparency also left the company’s operational team in the dark about what was causing the CPU bottlenecks.