Bank data safe as houses
Bank data safe as houses
Queensland bank Suncorp Metway has found security in a Storage Area Network.
One of the biggest advantages of data storage is the ability to have the latest information available any time, particularly when access can mean the difference between keeping a pleased customer and losing a dissatisfied one.
Suncorp Metway, Australia's seventh largest bank, is heeding this lesson, to maintain its own internal mandate of having a higher level of customer satisfaction than its competitors.
To help meet this target, the bank has steadily rolled out a Storage Area Network (SAN) to connect its system of isolated servers.
With online access to account information, Suncorp metway has become more focussed on maintaining high data availability.
Suncorp Metway processes transactions for more than 2.5 million customers, and over its three years the organisation has amassed a data repository of more than four terabytes (TB), which were stored on the bank's multiple Hewlett-Packard servers.
The problem with this situation was that staff could not freely share information across this network, said Suncorp Metway manager of enterprise technical services, Howard Charles.
"We need to have free and constant access to our information all of the time," he said. "This is part of what a financial institution needs to have to establish credibility."
The bank was also steadily increasing its data, and servers could only fit a limited number of the tape drives it used before another server had to be introduced. This costly exercise was exacerbated by the fact that at some times the bank had storage capacity in other parts of the server environment, but the bank could not readily move storage arrangements to utilise this capacity. This meant some storage capacity was simply going to waste.
SAN SOLUTION
The twin issues of being unable to share data and not having room to grow, promoted Suncorp Metway to opt for a networked solution. The bank wanted to use a SAN as it could provide redundancy for disaster recovery, as well as high availability.
"The main thing we have to have is high availability of our data," said Mr Charles. "The equipment for this may have come at a slight premium, but the resulting 24/7 availability is certainly a trade-off. Our data is our business."
The bank also wanted a SAN as it could provide cross-platform access to data, however this proved easier in theory than in practice.
Mr Charles said the bank intended to integrate Hitachi drives with HP hardware, but interoperability issues eventually forced it to seek another solution.
SELF TAUGHT
As Suncorp Metway tested each SAN system before purchasing it, Mr Charles discovered that many inter-vendor server/drive/SAN combinations did not operate as well as the bank wanted.
He also learned that while storage vendors were aware of interoperability issues, many of these issues around operating standards had not been developed by the time of the bank's implementation. Because of this, Suncorp Metway decided on a solely Hitachi SAN solution, which was implemented for tape backup in October 1998.
As the bank had trouble finding SAN implementation expertise at the time, IT staff became more familiar with networked storage throughout the testing process.
"Storage is more important than processors."
Mr Charles, whose background is in mainframe systems, said that the key to making this situation work was understanding the main problem they wanted to solve. In Suncorp Metway's case, the ability to share storage capacity and have high data availability were the primary criteria to meet.
The bank has already recorded dramatic improvements in access after the implementation. "There has been a 300 per cent improvement in the processing times of our Unix applications, an increase in data availability, and a better backup capability," said Mr Charles.
"We can also reuse infrastructure by utilising spare storage capacity in the mainframe, mid-range and NT environments. We're not wasting this space."
Mr Charles said the SAN has also become easier to manage under the bank's storage scheduling and capacity plan. The bank's robotic tape libraries, in conjunction with the direct access to storage servers that the SAN permits, have increased its response time when restoring data, and has completely removed manual intervention from the process.
The bank must still introduce more servers as its data repositories grow, but the ability to move storage around as needed has made this a less expensive, less frequent and more easily manageable exercise.
WHERE TO NOW?
Now fourteen months into the implementation, Suncorp Metway uses its Fibre Channel SAN to connect 25 Unix servers on two sites four kilometres apart, that store a total of 1.6TB of data. The bank uses a combination of disk and central tape libraries for its backup.
The SAN rollout is continuing, with the bank planning to move 1.7TB of data from its NT servers over to its Unix environment. Mr Charles expects the SAN to hold more than 3TB of data in the next 12 months, including account information, transaction records, testing data, mail and internal data from its PeopleSoft enterprise system.
After going through the implementation, the bank has also realised the value of its information resources.
"Storage is more important than processors," said Mr Charles. "We can replace a CPU, but not our data."