OTP Bank
Hungary’s Largest Bank Streamlines Backup and Restore Operations with Sun StorageTek Technology
OTP Bank, together with its wholly-owned financial services providers, is a universal bank focusing on retail customers and constitutes the leading financial group on the Hungarian credit institutions’ market of more than 30 players. OTP Bank Group is currently servicing more than 11 million clients in nine countries through its 1,300 branches and via its electronic channels.
Customer Challenges
- Centralize and streamline backup and restore operations
- Reduce IT administration time and operating costs
- Improve storage utilization
- Establish scalable infrastructure for growth
Solution
OTP Bank deployed a central backup and restore system based on Sun storage and server technology that is designed to support current and future bank applications.
Business Results
- Reduced backup and restore times by 2X
- Increased storage capacity
- Reduced storage footprint
- Reduced power costs per unit of storage
Story Details
OTP Bank, acting through its Bulgarian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian and Ukrainian subsidiaries, is one of the major participants of the banking sector in Central-Eastern Europe and is one of the most profitable credit institutions throughout Europe.
In 2006, OTP Bank recognized the need to centralize its backup and restore operations in Hungary, where the IT team supports approximately 7,000 users at 400 sites. OTP had already deployed a back up solution based on Sun StorageTek tape libraries and Veritas software.
However, the legacy system was designed to back up multiple applications on separate network circuits, with an individual tape library assigned to each class of application. This siloed approach to backup and restore operations proved complex to manage and costly to maintain. In addition, as data volumes grew, the system was not efficiently scaling to accommodate growth. As a result, the IT team found it increasingly difficult to complete backups within assigned windows and recover files quickly to meet business needs.
Based on its strong relationship with Sun and its assessment of Sun’s newer storage technology, OTP Bank opted to consolidate and centralize its backup and restore processes on Sun StorageTek technology.
At its primary datacenter, OTP Bank consolidated five older Sun tape libraries on to a single Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library system. At a second site used for disaster recovery, the bank added one Sun StorageTek L180 tape library and one L700 tape library, the latter replacing an existing Sun StorageTek C2 Autoloader. The tape libraries are equipped with a mix of Sun StorageTek T9840C and LTO 2/3 tape drives. Sun StorageTek ACSLS Manager software provides centralized library management and helps eliminate single points of failure. NetBackup resides on a high availability cluster of Sun Fire V240 servers running the Solaris OS and Sun Cluster 3.1 software. It provides an extra level of data protection by backing up data from the SL8500 library to the L700 and L180 libraries, simultaneously. A SunSpectrum agreement provides 24/7 support for the solution.
The new solution enables the IT team to manage from a single console backup and restore operations for more than 120 servers distributed across a storage area network and a file sharing local area network. The servers have various operating systems, including Solaris and Microsoft Windows. They host Oracle and Microsoft SQL server databases, and host applications and services including Microsoft Exchange, SAP, account management, customer-facing Web applications and more. Sun Professional Services worked with OTP Bank to optimize backup and restore processes and integrate the new system with the existing applications and servers.
OTP Bank estimates significant savings from the enhanced storage infrastructure and backup/restore system. Savings result from reductions in maintenance, administration and power costs and the ability to store more data in less space. The bank has also reduced backup and restore times with the new solution.
OTP Bank, with help from Sun, has established a flexible data protection and storage infrastructure that can be expanded to support new applications and services. The bank is now planning similar infrastructure upgrades at its subsidiary banks in other countries. As part of this effort, OTP Bank is planning to deploy a Sun StorageTek SL500 modular library system at its subsidiary in Serbia.
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