Bank invests in blade servers and on-demand

Bank BNP Paribas is using a combination of blade servers and on-demand computing to provide the processing power for its fixed income derivatives business.

In a multimillion dollar deal, IBM is providing supercomputing power through its new London Deep Computing Capacity on Demand centre to support the bank's derivatives operations - which include computation algorithms that require an increasing amount of computer power.

The implementation of this service follows the signing of a three-year on-demand computing deal between IBM and the bank for 2,500 IBM BladeCentre servers-worth of capacity and scope for up to 2,500 more.

BNP Paribas head of fixed income capital markets production Bruce Lee said the bank conducted an extensive review of the options to provide the capacity to support its applications for the second half of 2006 and beyond, looking at 18 different options.

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But he said IBM's on-demand option emerged as the most competitive on price/performance, comparing favourably with buying hardware and hosting it ourselves.

He said in a statement: "Now, having gone live in under three months we are confident we made the right choice."

BNP Paribas also wanted to build capability that could meet the needs from New York and Tokyo by processing their computing jobs on the central calculation farm in Europe. BNP Paribas is the second major bank to opt to use IBM's new London on demand centre which opened last month.