Every server at HDFC Bank had its own direct attached storage that led to distributed storage upgrades and inefficient use of storage. The storage sub-systems were not highly available and resilient. Thus, to provide scalable, reliable storage systems, and a SAN environment for all their applications, HDFC Bank opted for a solution from Hitachi Data Systems.

Playing in a dynamic market, where there is a constant need to innovate and stay ahead of competition, HDFC Bank's objective is to build sound customer franchises across distinct businesses, so as to become the preferred provider of banking services for target retail and wholesale customer segments. HDFC Bank's business philosophy is based on four core values-operational excellence, customer focus, product leadership, and people.

Quite a Network
Headquartered in Mumbai, HDFC Bank has a network of over 500 branches spread over 220 cities across India. All branches are linked on an online real-time basis. Customers in over 120 locations are also serviced through telephone banking. The bank's expansion plans take into account the need to have a presence in all major industrial and commercial centers where its corporate customers are located. Also  building a strong retail customer base for both deposits and loan products. Being a clearing/settlement bank to various leading stock exchanges, the bank has branches in the centers where the NSE and BSE have a strong and active member base.

IT at the Bank
HDFC Bank operates in an automated environment in terms of information technology and communication systems. All the bank's branches have online connectivity, which enables it to offer funds transfer facilities to its customers. Multi-branch access is also provided to retail customers through the branch network and ATMs.

In terms of software, the corporate banking business is supported by Flexcube, while the retail banking business by Finware, both from i-flex Solutions. The core banking software is running on both IBM AIX and SUN solaris. The BI is running on HP servers. It has various other banking applications on Microsoft and solaris servers.

The bank has prioritized its engagement in technology and the Internet as one of its key goals and has already made significant progress in web-enabling its core businesses.

“We have roughly more than 150 TB of storage on Hitachi technology. We have our production servers running on enterprise storage and our entire test and development servers on modular storage,” says Anand Sankararaman, assistant VP-IT, HDFC Bank.

And After
Every server in the organization had its own direct attached storage. This led to distributed storage upgrades and inefficient use of storage. Also, each time the organization needed to scale, it used to involve downtime. The storage sub-systems were not highly available and resilient. The organization has ordered around 75 TB of enterprise class storage and about 30 TB of modular and SATA Storage for use by applications due to growth in the business and addition of new applications to support existing and new business areas.

Why Hitachi! 
According to Sankararaman, “Our objective was to provide acceptable response time to users with highly available system infrastructure, and storage played a very important role in achieving the same.” The implementation was to allow the bank to improve the response time for the users as well as reduce the time taken for batch activities. This was in addition to the need to protect data by replication to a remote site.

They were unable to scale effectively using DAS. The organization has been growing at a rapid pace. The last two years have seen about 100% growth in the number of branches and the users. Expecting a similar growth going forward, the bank also implemented storage for business intelligence applications. The need was to reduce the time that was used for the month-end run, as well as to be able to protect data of huge sizes of over 1 TB by using storage software technologies-Shadow Image. The basic rationale was to take the benefit of tiering of storage. According to Sankararaman, “We used the core-to-edge strategy of distributing the production on enterprise storage and use all the test and development on modular storage. At present, we also have SATA storage for all our backup of production servers before they are transferred to the tape drive.”

One of the primary reason was that Hitachi is vendor agnostic. And as we have so many vendors for our products, this was a critical feature, says Sankararaman. For the bank, the primary purpose of going in for storage solutions in 2002 was for the purpose of protecting data by replicating the same to a DR site using the storage software. “However, when we moved the applications from a DAS environment to a SAN environment, we had to revisit the way we used to do our backups. The process change actually allowed us to free the production servers for the end of the day activities, whereas backups used to happen from an off-host server. This allowed us to reduce the amount of time for which the system was taken down for the purpose of end of day activities,” he says. Hitachi had the technology at the time of making the decision, and another reason was cost of the overall solution.

Solutions at Work
The HDS 9960 enterprise class storage helped implement the disaster recovery setup and consolidation from the existing DAS. The director class Brocade 12000 was used to implement scalable core to edge architecture for SAN. This enabled connectivity and scalability. Tagmastore helped in implementing a powerful and scalable storage for BI applications. Other modular storage (9570 / 9580 / 9585 and 9585 SATA) was used to implement a test environment for their mission-critical applications. The SATA storage helped implement an effective disk staging solution for the enterprise backup environment-Veritas, thereby increasing the efficiency of their tape drives. “Tagmastore 9990 and Brocade 48000 helped us scale our SAN infrastructure from a growth perspective. It has also helped us gear up to embrace 4 Gbps technology. This has also enabled us to roll out our business continuity planning,” adds Sankararaman. He said the bank moved from an initial distributed DAS to consolidated SAN and again moved to a distributed SAN. Over the period, they have adopted the HDS tiering of storage solution where they use different set of storage for different applications. The enterprise storage is deployed for all the online production sub-systems, the modular storage is deployed for all the test and development sub-systems, and SATA for all the backups.

HDFC bank is using all ERP, CRM with BI, OLTP/RDBMS, e-mail from Lotus, core banking, treasury management etc.; the complete capacity with production and test development is more than 150 TB.

Ups and Downs
The ability to protect data (also at DR site), scalability, reliability, availability, and performance were some immediate benefits. “By implementing solutions from Hitachi Data Systems, we were able to provide scalable, available, reliable storage systems, and a SAN environment to all our applications,” says Sankararaman. They were also able to protect data for all their key systems using the storage software solutions.

“We faced a lot of problems in getting various vendors together on the same table and make them speak to each other,” says Sankararaman. There were issues wherein some of the perceived benefits of the storage software solutions did not materialize because of limitations in the environment. Alternate options had to be looked at-Quiesce on Sybase Database and Shadow Image for off-host backup. They had to choose benefits from various technologies to suit the bank's environment. As a result, the bank was unable to reduce the backup window for the retail liabilities system-Finware because of the above functionality not working in their environment.

Minu Sirsalewala
minuvs@cybermedia.co.in 

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