A tiered approach reduces costs

The Australian banking sector has never been considered particularly benevolent. While people want their money and investments to be protected and secure, there has been little expectation that banks would give back to the community over their shareholders. With annual profits in the billions and increasing each year, many people - especially those in rural or regional areas - feel that the banks have forgotten about the very communities which they ultimately rely on
to post these enormous profits.

Not all banks operate this way. Bendigo Bank prides itself as being a people’s bank. Bendigo has created a “Community Bank” franchise program that exists to serve the needs of small communities. The program lets local communities own and operate a Bendigo Bank branch (which is separately incorporated) with Bendigo providing the support and infrastructure in a profit-share arrangement.

The bank’s 360 branches across the country, 190 of which are community branches, serve the banking and financial needs of individuals, businesses, farmers and not-for profit groups. While this approach has been beneficial to rural communities, it has also put an increasingly large strain on Bendigo’s storage infrastructure.

Bendigo’s original storage infrastructure was built around two IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server machines. The first was located at the bank’s production site and ran both IBM z/OS and open-source systems. The other was a disaster-recovery solution located some 20 kilometres from the bank.

While the bank was happy with the current performance of these servers, each new branch opening was placing increased demands on their storage environment. When the end of the lease approached, Bendigo decided that it was time to look at augmenting its existing storage capacity to support the bank’s expected future growth.

As a publically-listed financial institution, Bendigo needed to maximise its business productivity while reducing the costs associated with the operation of its storage infrastructure. With this imperative in mind, the bank assembled a list of requirements for a storage solution. These were largely based around cost savings and future-proofing. While new hardware would come at an inevitable cost, Bendigo identified staff and software licensing costs as two areas where savings could easily be made to offset the investment.