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.
After a thorough internal examination of the storage needs of the company, Bendigo identified several requirements that would have to be satisfied to justify the business case of incorporating a new storage solution. Any new storage setup would have to markedly increase the bank’s business resiliency while simultaneously reducing personnel costs. The bank decided that the best way to achieve this was through simplifying its storage management processes.

To avoid purchasing new software, it was also a requirement that the bank’s essential business applications would integrate seamlessly with new hardware. Equipped with an understanding of the dynamic nature of storage technology, Bendigo also wanted to be able to support multiple platforms while capitalising on its existing hardware.

With their existing storage infrastructure built around IBM hardware, Bendigo decided to continue their relationship with the vendor. After evaluating the bank’s needs, IBM suggested a tiered storage initiative that would target storage deficiencies, reduce storage costs and, importantly, provide support for the bank’s future growth.

IBM developed its tiered storage solution foundation around Bendigo’s existing storage hardware. Alongside the bank’s two existing Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) machines, Bendigo also deployed two IBM TotalStorage DS8100 disk systems to support its existing IBM eServer xSeries and zSeries servers and Sun Microsystems machines. The bank’s production DS8100 machine offered 20 terabytes of storage capacity while its data-recovery located DS8100 would provide the bank with 15 terabytes of much-needed storage.

To analyse and store data across this more complex storage environment, Bendigo opted to deploy IBM’s TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software. The software gave the bank the ability to increase its storage utilisation and application availability through the use of heterogenous storage servers. This functionality appealed to Bendigo as it allowed them to accurately match storage costs with the real value of the data to be stored.

To manage the replication of its z/OS data, Bendigo also decided to use a peer-to-peer remote copy software solution called IBM TotalStorage Metro Mirror. The software allows Bendigo to flexibly copy data across its existing and new storage servers. The SVC software assisted the bank in migrating all of its open-systems data.

In order to maintain a flexible yet simple storage management environment, Bendigo also chose to implement IBM’s TotalStorage Productivity Centre (TPC) software. This provided the bank’s staff with a single view of their open-systems storage environment. Crucially for Bendigo, it also allowed for management of their existing IBM and Cisco devices.

In line with the bank’s wishes for open systems, the System Storage servers offered storage support for a variety of open systems and mainframe data. The servers were compatible with the bank’s entire primary banking applications systems which include Microsoft Exchange, various document retention systems, as well as Internet banking information.

The new storage foundation allowed Bendigo to begin creating an information lifecycle management (ILM) solution. The ILM will enable the bank to keep its storage costs low by housing data across multiple storage tiers according to the value of the data. The SVC software enabled Bendigo to leverage its existing assets rather than relying on costly new storage capacity. The TPC software also fulfilled the bank’s wishes to reduce personnel requirements and costs. Bendigo is also enjoying lower software licensing costs due to only needing to purchase licenses for the z/OS portions of its new DS8100 servers.