Karnataka Bank

Story Details

Karnataka Bank strives to be a technology-savvy, progressive and customer-centric financial institution. Like most financial organizations, the bank relies on mission-critical applications to provide real-time information, continuously.

Due to recent expansion, the number of branches and customers has grown, which placed an additional load on the Karnataka Bank IT infrastructure. As a result, the bank wanted to find a better-performing, scalable data storage solution to support its important Oracle, Finacle and MySQL applications. To comply with the Reserve Bank of India data reporting requirements, Karnataka Bank also needed to implement a disaster recovery plan that would help ensure zero data loss in case of emergencies and provide business continuity through an effective application backup strategy.

After considering solutions from such companies as EMC and IBM, Karnataka Bank decided on a storage solution from Sun Microsystems. Sun storage architects provided the bank with implementation services to deploy a three-way disaster recovery solution based on the Sun StorageTek 9990V storage system to support its open systems architecture running the Solaris 10 OS, Linux and Windows Operating Systems. One 13 terabyte 9990V system is housed in the bank's primary datacenter in Bangalore, one 13 terabyte system is deployed at its disaster recovery site in Mangalore and one 8 terabyte system is installed at its nearline site in Bangalore.

The company chose the Sun StorageTek 9990V system because of its industry-leading performance, scalable crossbar switch architecture, integrated storage virtualization, dynamic provisioning and logical partitioning features. All of these features help the bank run its critical applications.

Sun StorageTek 9900 Universal Replicator software is used to replicate data effectively between its thee datacenter locations. Data is replicated between the bank's primary and nearline sites using synchronous replication, and between its nearline and disaster recovery sites asynchronously. With its ability to asynchronously replicate over any distance in a heterogeneous environment, the replicator software helps the bank significantly lower the cache and resource consumption of its primary storage system. In addition, the delta resynch feature, which, when coupled with three-datacenter multihop support, provides the bank with the most concurrent multisite replication capability and enhanced data protection available.

Sun StorageTek 9990 ShadowImage In-System Replication software uses high-speed, non-disruptive local mirroring to rapidly create multiple copies of critical bank data within the 9990V systems that can be quickly recovered in the event of disaster or data corruption. Virtual Partitioning Manager software enables the logical partitioning of ports, cache and disk capacity on the 9990V systems, while HiCommand Tuning Manager software is utilized to manage storage network resources and helps reduce total cost of ownership by maximizing storage utilization, improving storage performance and capacity management.

Leveraging the 9990V integrated virtualization feature, Karnataka Bank has improved the utilization and flexibility of its legacy systems by aggregating a mix of internal and external storage systems into a single, flexible, virtual pool. The bank has been able to simplify management and reduce its overall total cost of ownership as a result. The Sun storage architects were able to protect the bank’s investment by reusing its legacy storage in a productive manner, so that the copies of the data used for reporting and backup were accessible as needed.

For backup, the Karnataka Bank chose to consolidate it backup storage environment from legacy Sun StorageTek tape libraries to two 100-slot Sun StorageTek SL500 modular library systems with LTO 4 tape drives. As a result, the bank has lowered its total cost of ownership through reductions in storage management, service and software license costs. The SL500 libraries have also minimized downtime and increased protection levels of critical information by providing monitoring, management and control capabilities. Superior redundancy features such as power supplies, fans, library and interface controllers, and drives help eliminate single points of failure and minimize service interruptions for the bank. Plus, advanced monitoring tools with email alerts and SNMP free up staff resource to focus on other tasks. A SunSpectrum agreement provides hardware and software support for the Sun solution.

Karnataka Bank now has a storage infrastructure that helps enable the organization’s critical applications to be available around the clock. The bank has also streamlined its datacenter operations, boosted storage bandwidth and helped ensured business continuity for its applications.