ING Buys SANity

ING Vysya Bank provides a wide variety of

banking services, including corporate banking, retail banking, commercial

banking, treasury management, rural banking and private banking. It also

provides a number of financial products such as credit and debit cards, mutual

funds and demat accounts to its customers.

ING Vysya Bank has been an early adopter of technology, implementing

world class IT systems to support its business operations.

“We realized very early that technology would play a

critical role in helping us establish and maintain industry leadership,” says

V Viswanathan, head-IT, ING Vysya Bank. 

Data is critical to the operations of any financial

institution. The wide range of operations ING Vysya Bank was engaged in and its

massive customer base of more than 1.5 mn customers meant that it generated on

an average hundreds of transactions per day. ING Vysya took a full 12 hours to

backup the data from the day's transaction onto a disk based storage system,

which meant that a tremendous load was being put on its infrastructure and

transaction processing capabilities. “Backing up the data we generated was

itself in danger of being a bottleneck to our business growth,” informs

Viswanathan.

The bank clearly needed a cutting edge data storage solution

that would obviate these issues and allow it to concentrate on its core

business. Therefore, ING Vysya decided to implement a SAN solution of IBM that

would reduce the extremely long day end backup window it had, and that would

release its IT systems to conduct business activities.

IBM implemented its SAN solution, as well as its storage

virtualization solution. The solution offered the unparalleled scalability that

could keep pace with the exponential increase in its data backup volumes without

compromising on performance. The solution can scale up to 55.9 TB, which

essentially means that the bank future proofed its storage. Another major

advantage to the bank was that the physical capacity of the solution could be

scaled without any service disruption or downtime at all. In addition, the bank

can now make FlashCopies-point in time copies of its data-for data security

and integrity. 

IBM's storage virtualization solution ensured that the

bank could integrate and let multiple storage systems coexist, providing a high

degree of investment protection. The virtualization solution also ensured easy

and dynamic allocation of storage to various applications depending on the need.

Viswanathan adds, “We implemented a disk based system for backing up the

FlashCopies, instead of investing unnecessarily in a high end system.” To

ensure a robust infrastructure, IBM also implemented LTO 3583 tape library, DS

4300- mid range disk based storage system etc. ING Vysya Bank also runs a number

of its mission critical applications and services on IBM solutions, including

its core banking solution, Internet banking and ATM infrastructure.

The banks' end of day activity of building backup has been

reduced to 5 hours from the original 12 hours thanks to IBM's solutions. This

translates to a more than 40% performance increase. In addition to higher I/O

throughputs, the bank can now handle the exponential increases in its backup

requirements with ease. This has been accompanied by a significant reduction in

the stress put on the network and its systems. And most importantly, ING Vysya

Bank can now offer new levels of service in a market scenario where any

dissatisfaction can lead to a customer exodus to competitors. Viswanathan says,

“With the help of IBM's storage solutions, we are now an 8 am to 8 pm bank,

leading to a huge increase in customer satisfaction.”

Team DQ 



mail@dqindia.com