As an institution moving to the Banner platform we had a difficult decision to make. Our previous system, ran on an IBM System z, we were very happy with the savings in both energy and infrastructure that using the System z had afforded us over the years, but Banner was not supported on the platform, yet.

We decided to forge a new path and convinced Sungard to support us on an experiment to attempt implementation on System z. Now more then a full year after our very successful implementation, System z is a supported platform for Banner.

The presentation will cover how we implemented the Banner infrastructure, some of the challenges that we faced and how we have been able to handle them. We will discuss both the benefits of running in a virtualized environment, plus some of the unique characteristics. Finally, we'll cover the methodology used to load test the infrastructure and steps we took to tune the database and the virtual environment.