Disaster Planning That Pays for Itself
From Boardroom Minutes
In a tough economic climate, how do you justify investment in
technology you hope you will never have to use? That's the challenge
CIOs face when they seek boardroom approval for business continuity
projects.
During the 1990s, according to analyst firm TowerGroup, global
spending on disaster recovery rose at a steady clip of 3 percent to
5 percent a year. Predictably, after September 11, there was a sharp
spike: Investment growth surged to 19.2 percent to reach $3.35
billion in 2002, only to slip back to a projected 6.4 percent this
year.
Because most disaster recovery projects don't have measurable return
on investment, such projects are in danger of taking a backseat.
Unless, that is, firms find smart new ways to address the issue.
Round-the-Clock Reliability
Korea's Kookmin Credit Card Company has done just that. Instead of
parceling its disaster recovery planning off as a separate project,
the company has made it part of its moves to increase operational
efficiency and reduce infrastructure costs. "By reallocating a
portion of our systems to the disaster recovery site, we are saving
KRW1.7 billion ($1.4 million) annually in IT infrastructure costs,"
says Jung Tae Kim, IT operations team leader at Kookmin.
The Seoul-based company serves more than 15 million credit card
holders. In addition to its regular credit-related services, Kookmin
provides Internet-based account management, making it vital that it
maintain round-the-clock system availability.
When Korea's regulatory authorities recently mandated that all
financial institutions create backup centers to protect customer
account information in the event of a man-made or natural disaster,
Kookmin had already launched an initiative designed not only to
establish a business continuity site, but also to streamline
operations.
More than 4 million people subscribe to Kookmin's Web-based service.
"Any interruption to our online service provision could greatly
damage the company because our customers have come to depend on the
convenience of accessing their accounts online," says Kim. "But in
addition to creating a backup center, we wanted to utilize the
capacity of our main data center systems to maximum efficiency. We
felt that by doing that we could create an environment ready to
deliver the performance we need to handle our growing customer base."
Kookmin has utilized Sun servers since 2000 and felt it would be a
natural progression to involve Sun in its business continuity plans.
"We knew that the Sun consultants could manage the project for us,"
Kim explains, "allowing us to realize our aggressive three-month
time-to-market objective for complying with the government
requirement." And in fact, the backup center, based on server and
storage technology from Sun, took just three months to set up.
Three Months to Market
In the first month, Sun worked with Kookmin and iForce partner
Haorum to reallocate system resources in the main data center to
help maximize availability. The team found, as Kookmin had
suspected, that almost two-thirds of the credit card company's
servers were running at 30 percent capacity, and others at only 10
percent. Sun recommended increasing Kookmin's existing server
capacity by 50 percent and splitting that capacity between the main
data center and the backup site—enabling system recovery within
three hours of a catastrophic outage.
Working with software solution provider Opentech, another iForce
partner, Sun then redeployed Kookmin's existing servers running the
Solaris Operating Environment (from Sun Fire and Enterprise servers
to Netra servers and Ultra workstations, the next generation of
which falls under the Sun Blade name), consolidated server capacity,
and reallocated some of it to the backup center.
As a result, Kookmin reduced the number of servers in its main data
center from 38 to 24, conserving floor space and cutting expenses.
Sun deployed the remaining 14 servers in the backup center along
with 17 new ones, creating a replica of the main data center and
providing Kookmin with the processing power it needed.
To complete the backup facility, Sun worked with two more iForce
partners, integrator Dacomin and reseller Hyosung Information
Systems, to deploy a storage-area network (SAN), based on Sun
StorEdge technology. This creates for Kookmin a shared channel to
facilitate easy data transfers between the two data centers.
"With Sun StorEdge technology, we have rapid and reliable data
access for our business-critical applications, and our system
availability since installation has been 100 percent," says Kim.
"We have found the flexible configuration options of Sun's products
to be instrumental in terms of maximizing return on our investment
in the new hardware. In fact, we expect 100 percent ROI in 11
months."
 Back to top
| 
