Swan Solutions helps largest bank to digitize its retail banking experience by upgrading its IT infrastructure

Swan Solutions, a leading provider of end-to-end information technology solutions, today announced that they have enabled one of India's leading banks to digitize its entire retail banking experience by upgrading its IT infrastructure. With the help of Swan Solutions, the bank is now able to run their new digital banking services with high availability and scalability. The solution implemented by Swan has resulted in reduced the processing time for a debit card/credit card and loan approvals from over two weeks to less than thirty minutes.

Until now, the bank focused on customers aged over 40. The new-generation customers are highly-informed and expect real time responses from a bank. To cater to this segment, the bank introduced a new digital business strategy which features a range of advanced digital banking capabilities including instant account opening with personalized debit cards, and instant loan approvals for car and home loans.  Normally, the bank would take 15 to 30 days after receiving the required documents to process the request and deliver the card to the customer. With the new solution, the bank makes it possible to generate the new card in 15 to 30 minutes after receiving the documents and verifying records.

The bank required a better hardware environment to run this solution. They also wanted a long term solution that would address the IT needs of the bank for up to five years until next upgrade. To design and run the new digital banking services, the bank approached Mumbai-based Swan Solutions. Swan Solutions, being experts in infrastructure space designed and implemented a suitable solution.

Overview of Solutions:

1. HP Blade System c7000: Swan Solutions replaced the physical servers by installing and configuring HP Blade System c7000 enclosure with 15 HP Blade servers.
2. VMware's Hypervisor 5.5 update 1: This was installed on each blade server. With the update, VMware can run multiple applications on one server without any issues around operating systems, instead of running just one application as was done earlier.
3. VMware vCenter management server: Swan Solutions also installed and configured VMware vCenter management server which provides a centralized platform to manage, automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure with confidence. 55 virtual machines were created, configured according to user specifications, and the affinity and anti-affinity rule was applied. Now, if a server fails, its data moves to the next available host. This helped save a significant expense on licensing.
4. VMotion: vMotion were added to avoid hardware downtime.
5. HP MSA2040SAN Storage: Swan Solutions configured HPMSA2040SANstoragein redundancy mode with the storage area network (SAN) switch environment. Now, if one SAN switch fails, data can be accessed easily from another path.
6. HP Virtual Connect: HP VC Flex-10 technology is a hardware-based solution that lets users simplify network I/O by splitting a 10 Gb/s server network connection into four variable partitions.
7. VMware Clusters: Swan Solutions grouped hosts into three categories - Database, Applications and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) - and a VMware Cluster was created for each environment. Thus, if the database fails, only one cluster has to be checked and fixed. Swan Solutions also created a separate data store for each environment - application, database and UAT. If any application requires more CPU power or memory, the process of updating it doesn't affect other servers. As a result, extra utilization of hardware is avoided.

Business Benefits

The implementation resulted in the following benefits:

• Reduced network manageability
• 24x7 Application and database server availability
• Single console to manage the VMware environment
• Single console to manage the complete hardware environment
• On-demand availability of additional hardware resources