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HDFC Bank, headquartered in Mumbai, delivers comprehensive corporate, retail, and treasury banking services. It operates as a clearing bank for both the Bombay Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange. It tries to meet the customer expectations by providing anywhere, anytime service. For HDFC, with a network of more than 530 branches across 228 cities in India, real-time banking is an experience. Branches have online connectivity through multi-branch networks and ATM services. The bank has Web-enabled most of its core commercial, retail, and treasury business.

Encountering Growing Pains
Despite the bank's substantial efforts to create infrastructure for a world-class bank, the exponential growth of data storage requirements was becoming an issue. Slowing response time for users, shrinking backup windows, and complicated regulations were compounding the challenges and risks for the bank. Considering these issues, the bank's plans to expand its retail customer base and extend its financial presence into more industrial and commercial centers. For this, the bank decided to revisit the technology environment.

The organization's servers were having direct attached storage (DAS), which caused fragmented storage upgrades, time-consuming month-end runs, and system downtime when scaling. Total storage needs were upwards of 100 TB, with core banking applications running on both IBM AIX and Sun Solaris operating systems on Microsoft and Sun servers. Business intelligence applications were running on HP servers. It was felt that the bank would first need to migrate from a distributed DAS-server infrastructure to a storage area network (SAN) environment and also implement a disaster recovery plan. A highly scalable tiered storage solution based on the Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, with advanced remote replication and single console management, was chosen by the bank's IT department to achieve the bank's storage goals.

Virtualizing Data Assets
The IT team began by installing three Universal Storage Platforms model USP600. Designed for industrial-strength virtualization and universal replication, USP600 navigates across heterogeneous storage systems with scalability up to 32 PB per platform and unsurpassed performance levels of up to 2.5 mn I/Os per second. The USP600 promotes external storage virtualization, logical resource partitioning, and universal replication for seamless, non-disruptive movement of data between tiers. The new SAN positioned the bank to easily scale for growth and to embrace 4Gbps technology.

Realizing SAN Flexibility
To maximize flexibility and responsive prioritization across the bank's storage, the SAN was extended with tiered storage. Rather than using production and off-host servers for end-of-day activities, the new SAN plan moved production storage onto the Hitachi Lightning 9960 storage system. This requirement of the bank demands a highly scalable and available SAN environment-the kind that can be created within a tiered storage solution based on the Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform. The bank believes in. Continual up gradation of the whole IT ecosystem for which it has currently ordered around 75 TB of enterprise Class Storage and about 30 TB of Modular and SATA Storage.

Hitachi Delivers Vault of Benefits
Deploying 150 TB of storage on Hitachi technology, HDFC Bank was able to evolve from a localized DAS labyrinth to a highly virtualized and centralized storage universe. To evaluate the performance of new storage infrastructure, the bank employed in-house benchmarking. Results showed that the bank's data warehouse could more than double in storage size without affecting throughput rates or changing any other configuration. “As our mission is to become a world class Indian bank, customer service is important to us and by implementing solutions from Hitachi Data Systems we were able to provide scalable, available, reliable storage systems and a SAN environment to all our applications. We were also able to protect data for all our key systems using the storage software solutions,” says Harish Shetty, vice-president (IT), HDFC Bank. By changing the way backups and batches are accomplished, the bank has been able to reduce the cycle times for end-of-day replication activities. The Hitachi storage has also enabled HDFC Bank to keep the cost low for multiple snapshots of large production databases-close to 3 TB each. The highly available system infrastructure provided by Hitachi was also delivering notably faster response time for users, helping to improve efficiency and productivity.

Gyana Ranjan Swain
gyanas@cybermedia.co.in

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