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HDFC Bank : Its about Storage

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Data is expanding, but at the same time traditional storage systems have low

disk utilization (30-40% is common among most storage systems). In traditional

storage implementations, space allocations are tied to physical disks, and

administrators usually provision more storage than is immediately required since

they do not want to change allocations frequently. This space over-allocation

then expands multiple times considering that the same volumes are backed up at

least once for business continuity purposes. This can lead to rapidly increasing

storage costs. CIOs are challenged with improving disk utilization rates in

order to save costs. When organizations buy systems on their own, an

unstructured storage infrastructure is created. Here technologies like storage

virtualization provides a way to simplify the resultant management complexity by

providing a single interface and makes for unified data management.

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In todays business, many copies of data are created, especially in

environments like software development, application upgrades, patches, bug

fixes, testing, etc. Obviously, if each copy has to take up the full storage

space, as is allocated to the production data, thats inefficient use of

storage. Virtualization technology enables virtual copies instead of full copies

and still provides individual copies to each group.

Whenever technology concepts like network storage and virtualization are

debated, questions on its successful proof-points and the benefits it brings to

table hog the limelight. HDFC, a leading bank in India with hundreds of branches

across the country leveraged storage and virtualization to its advantage. For

improving upon its operational efficiencies, the bank adopted SAN and created an

agile storage environment using tiered storage.

Key Advantages
  • SAN and virtualization offered the bank an

    optimal storage backbone that led to a significant tweak in its

    performance
  • Virtualization capabilities enabled the

    bank to keep the cost low for multiple snapshots of large production

    databases
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Scaling Challenges



Being a bank that is growing in leaps and bounds across several of its

services, there was a constant strain on scaling in sync with the growth. The

bank faced a big challenge in the area of storage. By upgrading its storage

infrastructure the bank has nearly doubled its number of branches and has been

able to scale effectively and meet the demands. In this backdrop, revisiting the

IT infrastructure became inevitability for the bank. HDFC faced specific issues

like slowing user response times, shrinking backup windows, and aspects like

complicated regulations compounded the problems.

The IT team of the bank looked at ways and means to mend the ailing areas. It

became evident that the main culprit hampering effective scalability was the

banks servers. The servers were attached to DAS which led to fragmented storage

upgrades, which in turn created a huge turn-around time during month-end and led

to downtime. With a plethora of OS and hardware cutting across Solaris to AIX,

HDFC decided to go in for SAN.

Benefits



The company went for storage solutions from Hitachi Data Systems. The

initial agenda while rolled out SAN was to consolidate the DAS environment with

SAN. Since then the company has come a long way in managing its storage

infrastructure and has created a robust and pro-active storage backbone. To

maximize flexibility and responsive prioritization across the banks storage,

SAN was extended with tiered storage. The up-gradation of its storage together

with virtualization capabilities have given it the required storage bandwidth to

manage its growth. Moreover, SAN and virtualization offered the bank an optimal

storage backbone that led to a significant tweak in its performance.

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For an organization like HDFC the high available storage system has provided

faster response times for users and is enabling the bank to improve efficiency

and productivity. Over a period of time, post deployment, the bank has worked

out ways and means of effectively leverage its SAN environment for deploying new

business intelligence. It also gained robust data protection capabilities.

Meanwhile on the disaster recovery front the bank was able to manage it

effectively, as it gained high degree of manageability.

For instance post the SAN deployment it is now able to scale without any

issues and can even double the storage size without impacting the throughput

rates. In the last one year the bank has significantly upgraded the storage

infrastructure with much newer solutions from Hitachi and was able to equip

itself with state-of-the-art storage that forms as a critical IT infrastructure

at HDFC.

Shrikanth G



shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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