CBA unifies storage on NetApp
CBA unifies storage on NetApp
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has consolidated its scattered storage assets by installing an integrated solution based on Network Appliance's F800 series devices.
The bank bought 4.1 terabytes of capacity, as well as hiring integration firm Australian Innovative Services to work with NetApp's professional services arm to set up a unified storage management structure within the company. While it did not give out a definitive figure on return on investment, the company said the new solution would decrease its storage costs significantly.
"We always knew we were spending a lot of time on storage management and are pleasantly surprised at the reduced management now required with theNetApp equipment," said Chris Liell-Cock, general manager for technology and programs and the bank's institutional and business services division. "Before consolidation we were facing storage growth in excess of 50 per cent per annum. The scattered deployment of storage across many file servers led to poor utilisation and an overly complex configuration."
The installation was carried out in Commonwealth's data centres across Australia over a period of four months, including site inspections, installations and handover. All of the data centres now undergo remote mirroring to a single disaster recovery site, according to the company.
Network Appliance said its professional services team helped the bank to implement departmental level billing and comprehensive data storage management. Australian Innovative Services completed the data migration function as part of the project, to ensure that information stored in legacy storage systems would be available under the new regime.
"Now we have up-to-the-minute information about utilisation, staff freed up for other activities, which means we can manage the storage with confidence. The centralised approach to storage has also led to a better business recovery capability and a vastly reduced number of calls to the support helpdesk. All of which ultimately helps us to deliver a superior service to the bank's customers," said Mr Liell-Cock.
Network Appliance's F800 filers are not the company's highest-performing devices - that being the 960 model in the F900 series - but they do allow storage managers to build a broad range of large-scale applications in network attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) configurations simultaneously, according to the company.
Image & Data Manager will be investigating the issue of return on investment for competing storage solutions in a major feature inside our upcoming January/February 2003 issue.
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