Lakshmi Vilas Bank Goes Virtual

08 June 2010 06:14 am , Vinita Gupta

Storage virtualisation and dynamic provisioning reduced operating costs and IT-
related risks for non-disruptive volume expansion at Lakshmi Vilas Bank

LAKSHMI VILAS BANK, one of the banks in South India has implemented an Enterprise
Storage Solution, a centralised system that the bank is using to consolidate all its business
databases into one single platform for managing and protecting vital customer data.
The need
With the increase in the business of the bank, it was found that the existing infrastructure
was not sufficient to take care of the complexities that were emerging, such as business
continuity requirements, data size, application tiering, instant copies of the data base for
testing new products and MIS. Therefore, it was necessary for Lakshmi Vilas Bank to go for
enterprise storage and also upgrade the present P Series servers of IBM.
“Managing the data was a major issue with the increase in business and consequent
increase in data size. It required a lot of capacity planning discussions to estimate the future
data size of the bank. The database of various applications running in the bank was lying in
a distributed manner and was difficult to manage and operate. The same has now been
consolidated and centralised using new enterprise storage solutions in the data centre”,
says B.Murali Nair, Chief Technology Officer at Lakshmi Vilas Bank According to him, the
biggest challenges were technical. The configuration of the system was extremely critical in
this enterprise storage project.

Centralised storage
To solve the problem, the bank opted for Hitachi storage virtualisation with Hitachi dynamic
provisioning. The end-to-end implementation started in October 2009 and was completed by
April 31st 2010. To ensure seamless implementation, the project was divided into phases.
The first step involved revamping of data cabling at the data centre followed by upgrading
the core switch and then the server and storage implementation. Each of these was a
separate project and the project management was handled by different project managers.
Virtualisation enabled the management of all assets in one single, virtualised pool, while
thin provisioning and business continuity services helped improving storage utilisation. The
bank’s prior IBM DS4800 storage solution is still been used for their non critical application
like intranet, leave management etc.
To further reduce banking transaction time and improve the accessibility of data between
branches and different channels like Net banking and ATM, the bank has also upgraded their
Core transaction Server from IBM P5 series to IBM P6 series. It has also been seamlessly
integrated with the new storage solution.
Increased turnaround time
The new solution has made database management much easier and ensures timely
availability of database to various departments in the bank. The administrators can now
easily create instances of the database and make them available to users in the
departments like offsite surveillance, ant-money laundering and product development team.
This was not possible earlier as the same database instance was used by all departments
and they had to wait for their turn. The result was huge time losses and delays.
“Thus operational efficiencies increased, turnaround time and redundancies improved and it
made it easier for virtualisation to be implemented. Thus we could observe a lot of
improvement in the overall operational efficiencies and operational costs,” said Nair.
Facilitate future IT projects
This solution is an important cog in the wheel, leading up to the implementation of a CRM
solution. It will start by facilitating efficient critical data management and help the bank to
embark on projects like data warehousing, data mining, business intelligence and channel
integration (SOA).