BNZ Capital has integrated its storage environments, eliminated tape backup and boosted disaster recovery through a storage consolidation project.
The corporate banking service needed to manage growing volumes of sensitive data across three New Zealand locations and link internationally with its parent NAB.
BNZ Capital bought two low-entry (previously known as F87) storage systems from NetApp for its Wellington and Auckland sites, later upgrading these to clustered FAS3020 systems. These matched similar technology in use in the bank’s parent company sites in Australia and London.
The move allowed BNZ Capital to consolidate its data onto a common infrastructure, a process which will continue this week when the bank plans to add its SQL Server-based reporting system to the environment, according to Gavin Ng, manager of service delivery technology.
Ng says further out BNZ Capital is looking to add its Sybase real-time deal capture and position-keeping system to the new environment as well.
Ng says the biggest challenge of the project was seeding the mirrors between Auckland and Wellington and getting the data back and forth over a 10Mbit/s link.This was solved by breaking it into small chunks, he says.
Since the initial implementation late last year, BNZ Capital has also added an iSCSI backend to the system. apart from that there has been the normal maintenance and upgrades taking place, he says.
Before Christmas 2008, the project allowed Windows and Unix-based storage to be combined onto one platform to allow a consolidated view of the storage environment and eliminating the need for separate support teams.
The project was implemented by Infinity solutions, now part of Fujitsu, which also implemented NetApp’s SnapRestore and SnapMirror software.
The FAS3020 systems are enterprise level platforms providing both high performance fibre channel and low cost SATA hard drives on the same platform.
The former are used for daily file system activity and the latter for backup and disaster recovery.