SANity Banking

The ICICI Group has been beset with some challenges since it undertook the

technological route. India’s private sector financial powerhouse’s main

challenge was to have systems scaling up commensurate with its growth rate.

Being in the retail space for many of its financial products, the number of

transactions were growing by leaps and bounds. Adding to the complexity were the

multiple channels of delivery like the phone, ATM, and Web. The ‘risk’

involved in the business grows with each additional customer and each additional

transaction. In the event of any disaster, system continuity has to be

guaranteed as part of the overall business continuity plan. This is done through

disaster recovery (DR) centers–an offsite center with redundancies in terms of

systems and storage.

ICICI’s

DR center is based at the Bandra-Kurla Complex office while its data-center is

at Mahalaxmi linked with two 34 Mbps leased lines from separate exchanges. As

early as June 1999, ICICI Infotech decided to consolidate all the servers by

going in for a few high-end servers, primarily Sun’s E10000’s and E6500’s.

Simultaneously, storage solutions were looked at to complete the centralized

architecture. ICICI chose a centralized architecture for SAN because it was easy

to manage and administer. The company studied the sensitivity of various

applications and the affordability of these applications going down for various

time periods.

Says Sanjay Belsare, AGM, ICICI Infotech, " The starting point of DR is

a thorough analysis from a business standpoint, what SLAs does the business

require, and things like that." Adds Manoj Kunkalienkar, President, ICICI

Infotech, " A DR center does not need to be idle–important functions like

bank MIS and data back-ups can be taken from a DRC."

Next were the considerations about storage. Redundancies had to be built in

the storage system itself, with no single point of failure. The storage

technology itself, as provided by various storage vendors along with study of

reference sites had to done to arrive at the right storage vendor. The vendor’s

level of support was a key decision factor. Openness and scalability–specifically

the ability to scale up and scale out–were other key considerations. Says

Belsare," The SAN has to support servers running on various platforms and

should interoperate with solutions from other vendors." Though Sun ruled

the server category at ICICI, the choices in the storage area boiled down to EMC

and HP. HP’s XP-512 eventually emerged the winner in the storage technology

considerations due to its robustness, replication ability, and having no single

point of failure. On the software side, the choice fell on Veritas’s

Foundation Suite and Veritas NetBackup. Three storage boxes, one 6.4 TB box for

the DR site and two boxes of 3.2 TB each for the production site connected

through four 16-port Brocade switches were procured. The production-site soon

ran out of capacity and has since been replaced with 6.4 TB boxes each.

Robotic-assisted back-up devices came from StorageTek. Data transfers done

through fiber connectivity included back-up data transfers. "Back-ups could

be taken at a rate of 300 GB/ hour–an unprecedented rate used by no one else

in India", claims Belsare. To provide I/O channel redundancy, servers are

linked to the SAN storage with 16 fiber-optic pipes each with a throughput of

100 MB/sec. The high-speed leased lines (34 Mbps) between the data center and

the DRC synchronizes and replicates data in real-time. The Sun servers on

booting, access the SAN for applications and databases. The operation is

seamless due to high I/O rates.

Says Kunkalienkar, " The SAN is very scalable and designed keeping in

mind our growing business volumes. It is as easy as plugging in additional

storage boxes as you run out of capacity."

Says Kunkalienkar, " The SAN system is strategic to the business. It

helps ICICI in becoming more customer-centric and helping advanced applications

like CRM easy to perform."

Easwardas Satyan