Leading Bank Powers Exponential Growth With Scalable Enterprise Storage

Challenge

Large APAC-based bank launched a powerful new app to give customers instant, anytime, anywhere access to banking services. It was an immediate success. So much so that the bank began experiencing near-exponential growth, leading the IT team to reevaluate their strategy for accommodating their digital evolution.

While they anticipated the expansion of their customer base would mean significant growth in transaction and data volumes, they had not realized their existing mid-range storage wouldn’t be able to scale to meet that demand. They needed a new enterprise storage infrastructure with greater capacity, performance and improved data protection.

Solution

An analysis of the bank’s growth trajectory, and requirement for a solution that can scale to meet their needs for the next five years, led the Hitachi Vantara team to propose a radically different approach.

Working collaboratively with the bank’s IT team, they designed a proof-of-concept for a solution that met the scalability, performance and data protection requirements to support their core banking applications.

The architecture included two Hitachi VSP 5500 arrays and one VSP E990, connected using Brocade G720 and 7810 switches and managed using Hitachi Ops Center.

The team had to deliver the project within several significant constraints. First, to meet regulatory requirements, they needed to prove that if the bank’s main data centers went offline, the system could still operate seamlessly from their disaster recovery site. The team achieved this by setting up a three-way replication configuration using Hitachi TrueCopy to synchronously replicate data between their primary and secondary data centers. Along with Hitachi Universal Replicator to asynchronously replicate to their disaster recovery location.

Second, the bank required that the migration of the core banking application would be completed live, without going offline or impacting performance. To build confidence in the strategy, the team first migrated non-critical applications to the new storage system, then higher-priority applications, and finally the core banking application itself. Each migration was flawless, delivered on time with zero downtime or performance impact.

Outcome

The Hitachi VSP solution has been running the bank’s most critical, performance-intensive production systems since inception, with no issues or downtime. Their IT team can even install patches on their storage controllers without needing to reboot them, so there’s no impact on availability or performance, even during planned maintenance.

Storage performance for applications has also improved dramatically. Response times, which had previously been 5-7 milliseconds, are now in the sub-millisecond range. That represents an improvement of 5x or more vs. the bank’s previous midrange systems.

Most importantly, the new platform has unlocked the scalability the bank needs to take the next steps on their digital journey as they continue to grow their customer base. And, with the ability to upgrade from four storage controllers to 15, the solution will be able to support all the company’s top-tier storage needs for the next five years, or more.