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Data is expanding, but at the same time traditional storage systems have low disk utilization (30-40% is common among most storage systems). In traditional storage implementations, space allocations are tied to physical disks, and administrators usually provision more storage than is immediately required since they do not want to change allocations frequently. This space over-allocation then expands multiple times considering that the same volumes are backed up at least once for business continuity purposes. This can lead to rapidly increasing storage costs. CIOs are challenged with improving disk utilization rates in order to save costs. When organizations buy systems on their own, an unstructured storage infrastructure is created. Here technologies like storage virtualization provides a way to simplify the resultant management complexity by providing a single interface and makes for unified data management.

In todays business, many copies of data are created, especially in environments like software development, application upgrades, patches, bug fixes, testing, etc. Obviously, if each copy has to take up the full storage space, as is allocated to the production data, thats inefficient use of storage. Virtualization technology enables virtual copies instead of full copies and still provides individual copies to each group.

Whenever technology concepts like network storage and virtualization are debated, questions on its successful proof-points and the benefits it brings to table hog the limelight. HDFC, a leading bank in India with hundreds of branches across the country leveraged storage and virtualization to its advantage. For improving upon its operational efficiencies, the bank adopted SAN and created an agile storage environment using tiered storage.

Scaling Challenges
Being a bank that is growing in leaps and bounds across several of its services, there was a constant strain on scaling in sync with the growth. The bank faced a big challenge in the area of storage. By upgrading its storage infrastructure the bank has nearly doubled its number of branches and has been able to scale effectively and meet the demands. In this backdrop, revisiting the IT infrastructure became inevitability for the bank. HDFC faced specific issues like slowing user response times, shrinking backup windows, and aspects like complicated regulations compounded the problems.

The IT team of the bank looked at ways and means to mend the ailing areas. It became evident that the main culprit hampering effective scalability was the banks servers. The servers were attached to DAS which led to fragmented storage upgrades, which in turn created a huge turn-around time during month-end and led to downtime. With a plethora of OS and hardware cutting across Solaris to AIX, HDFC decided to go in for SAN.

Benefits
The company went for storage solutions from Hitachi Data Systems. The initial agenda while rolled out SAN was to consolidate the DAS environment with SAN. Since then the company has come a long way in managing its storage infrastructure and has created a robust and pro-active storage backbone. To maximize flexibility and responsive prioritization across the banks storage, SAN was extended with tiered storage. The up-gradation of its storage together with virtualization capabilities have given it the required storage bandwidth to manage its growth. Moreover, SAN and virtualization offered the bank an optimal storage backbone that led to a significant tweak in its performance.

For an organization like HDFC the high available storage system has provided faster response times for users and is enabling the bank to improve efficiency and productivity. Over a period of time, post deployment, the bank has worked out ways and means of effectively leverage its SAN environment for deploying new business intelligence. It also gained robust data protection capabilities. Meanwhile on the disaster recovery front the bank was able to manage it effectively, as it gained high degree of manageability.

For instance post the SAN deployment it is now able to scale without any issues and can even double the storage size without impacting the throughput rates. In the last one year the bank has significantly upgraded the storage infrastructure with much newer solutions from Hitachi and was able to equip itself with state-of-the-art storage that forms as a critical IT infrastructure at HDFC.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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