Cornèr Banca SA

Story Details

Cornèr Banca, with headquarters in Lugano, Switzerland, focuses its activities in the private banking sector, offering a complete banking portfolio including credit card management.

During the 1970s, the bank introduced the Visa card to Switzerland. As changes occurred to the Visa system, the bank decided to migrate some applications from its mainframes to open systems. Today, Cornèr Banca relies entirely on Sun StorageTek disk and tape systems, and mainframes run parallel to open systems. Business-critical applications such as portfolio management and stock-market applications run on Microsoft Windows-based servers.

In the early 1990s, growth in data volumes began to present the bank with challenges. Cornèr Banca maintained a single storage system that was still able to keep pace with increasing data volumes. During this time, the bank decided to purchase Sun StorageTek systems for its primary datacenter in Pregassona and its disaster recovery site in Lugano. Cornèr Banca divided each system in a mainframe and open systems area, and mirrored the data of each area onto the second system.

At that point, data growth threatened to explode. New applications created new data that had to be stored. In addition, the increase in compliance requirements and regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, further contributed to growth in data volumes. Finally, new file formats entered data storage via e-mail attachments, pushing growth even further.

That’s when Cornèr Banca decided to install Sun StorageTek FLX280 storage systems and D178 sub-systems, and to abandon the previous split of mainframe and open systems areas on one system. Instead, a specific storage system was allocated to each platform. Nevertheless, the bank still adheres to the tried-and-tested principle of asynchronous replication of data. An application does not have to wait until data is actually saved. IPStor virtualization software from FalconStor, residing on a Sun Fire V40z server running Linux, recognizes the receipt of the data to be saved and ensures that it is correctly stored. Moreover, the principle of specific subsystems for specific platforms has the advantage that the bank can implement infrastructure modifications more easily.

More recently, Cornèr Banca introduced storage virtualization technology for backup and restore of its mainframe tape architecture. The bank added a Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) 4 system which resides between the mainframe and a Sun StorageTek PowderHorn 9310 tape library at its primary datacenter, equipped with Sun StorageTek T9840/9940 tape drives. A second VSM4 is housed at the bank's disaster recovery site.

Now able to handle 30 percent year-over-year data growth without increasing the number of system engineers and storage administrators, Cornèr Banca is committed to virtualization and to Sun. In addition to leveraging human resources more effectively, the bank is utilizing its storage investment much more cost effectively.

In the next 12 months, the bank will complete a disaster recovery system for the open systems area, lowering its recovery time objective from a week to three days. In this effort, it will be committed to providing better service than its competitors, at lower cost.