Catholic Syrian Bank

Story Details

CSB is helping to change the face of banking in India's rural and semi-urban areas. In the past, customers have had to conduct their banking at their local branch, because each of the 348 branches operated as independent entities, and none of the IT systems were connected. In addition, new government mandates required greater insight into account information. To help meet these challenges and to reduce operational costs, CSB decided to build a centralized, fully integrated system that would support the entire organization. As a result, CSB would have the technology needed to better manage data and support anywhere banking from any branch or mobile ATM. With plans to add 19 new locations and 25 offsite ATMs by the end of March 2008, the bank needed a system that was extremely scalable — as well as reliable and secure.

In March 2007, CSB engaged Sun partner LaserSoft Infosystems to help develop an integrated banking application on the Java platform, which would run on a centralized Oracle database and Sun hardware. CSB chose to build its new infrastructure on Sun technologies for several reasons. Lasersoft conducted a benchmark test on Sun Fire T2000 and Sun Fire V490 servers, as well as servers from IBM. Sun servers handled nearly twice the transaction load as the other environment, while using 50% less capacity than the other systems. In addition, the free licenses for the Solaris 10 OS and the scalability of Sun's solution and made the total cost of ownership of the Sun infrastructure far less than other solutions. For example, the Sun Fire T2000 supports up to 64 GB of memory and 32 simultaneous threads—and requires 30% less power and cooling than competitive systems. The V490 server can scale to support up to four dual-core 1.5 GHz processors, eight simultaneous threads, and 64 GB of memory.

From December 2007 through February 2008, Sun global migration partner Wipro installed and configured the new solution at a data center hosted by VSNL, a division of the $27 billion global communications giant the Tata Group. Two clustered Sun Fire V490 servers run Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and the Solaris Cluster 3.2 software. An additional V490 server — also part of the cluster — provides a remote standby environment. Two clustered T2000 servers support the new integrated banking application known as MAARVAL and software such as IBM WebSphere. Five clustered Sun Fire V245 servers host backup, channel interface, and reporting services. Two Sun StorageTek 6140 arrays, which can hold up to 84 TB, house mission-critical data on Fibre Channel disks and other information on SATA disks. One Sun StorageTek 2530 array provides external storage for the remote standby V490 server. In addition, one Sun StorageTek SL48 tape library provides long-term data storage. Administrators use the Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager software and Veritas Netbackup 6.5 Enterprise Edition to manage the arrays and backups remotely from branch locations.

Lasersoft rolled out the solution to branches at the end of February 2008. SunSpectrum Gold Support provides 24x7 protection from service interruptions or downtime. A combination of proactive, reactive, telephone, onsite, and Web-based offerings covers the company's servers, arrays and the Solaris 10 OS.

CSB's innovation is paying off. It has become the first bank in the state of Kerala to deploy mobile ATMs. Customers can also conduct banking from any CSB location or from any of the new ATMs. These innovations are also attracting new customers, and employees are more productive because they can access the information they need more quickly. In addition, the bank has consolidated its IT infrastructure, reduced datacenter space, and cut energy usage — which is translating into significant cost savings.