Hitachi success story
As the largest bank in Hungary, OTP Bank serves 4.6 million customers. In order to be able to deliver services efficiently to this large customer base, the bank’s IT architecture must be robust, scalable and highly available.
About OTP Bank
OTP Bank provides full range of financial services to its customers. As the largest bank in Hungary, OTP Bank serves 4.6 million customers. In order to be able to deliver services efficiently to this large customer base, the bank’s IT architecture must be robust, scalable and highly available. Total storage usage is around 400TB, and the rate of storagegrowth is approximately 40TB per year. OTP Bank uses a wide variety of servers, storage and software from various vendors. Its biggest installed base of servers comes from Sun Microsystems, and its high-end storage, which stores the majority of its data, comes from EMC and Hitachi Data Systems corporations. The bank’s most important software supplier is Oracle corporation, which provides the database and middleware applications for the IT environment.
Task One: Optimize Storage
In 2009, OTP Bank introduced the Operation Optimization Initiative, designed to reduce costs and improve efficiency across the whole IT infrastructure. Starting at the end of 2008, the initiative forced OTP to evaluate its storage. IT Operations department administrators decided that storage used for core banking applications needed to be consolidated and upgraded in order to meet the bank’s new cost and efficiency standards.
“Our new policy on optimizing all of our IT infrastructure gave us the opportunity to fully review our current storage and future storage needs. We need a storage system, which would not only improve efficiency, but also reduce costs,” - explained Director of IT Operations at OTP Bank, Mr. Tibor Andráskó.
Consolidating provided cost savings, through:
- Lowered maintenance costs
- Energy and floor space savings
- Simplified administration
- Better cost-to-performance ratio
Although OTP Bank was not specifically looking for a green solution, they got one with the new Hitachi hardware. They rather needed the extra floor space of the old Hitachi Lightning 9980V TM (Sun StorEge 9980V) storage system for new server racks.
Task Two: Upgrade Storage
In addition to the Lightning 9980V system, OTP Bank also had a Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V (USP V) before the migration, so a brand new storage purchase was not required. The IT Operations department only had to upgrade the USP V with new disks, cache, and back-end and front-end ports to ready it for the migration. Other brands were not considered, as the department staff was satisfied with the stability, scalability and performance of their old Lightning 9980V storage system.
OTP BankThey did not want to change storage platform; they only wanted to consolidate. Having previously worked successfully with Hitachi Data Systems and Hitachi TrueNorth Channel Partner Invigor Informatika, Ltd., in 2009, OTP Bank decided to upgrade to a USP V. Prior to the migration, this USP V contained: 44GB of cache, 284 HDDs for a total of 40.83TB raw capacity and 32 front-end ports. After the migration it contained: 60GB of cache, 388 HDDs for a total of 55.79TB raw capacity and 48 front-end ports.
“There was no question about upgrading to the new Hitachi storage, as we were absolutely satisfied with our previous Hitachi storage and the support service of Invigor,” - said Mr. Tibor Andráskó.
The migration was performed by Invigor. Hitachi provided technical support via SAN in online mode using Hitachi TrueCopy ® Synchronous software technology and on the host side VERITAS Volume Manager software. Complete migration of the sys- tem took 10 days with zero downtime.
“As a customer I am totally satisfied with the results of the migration and the service provided by Hitachi Data Systems. And I am absolutely pleased how smooth the migration went through with no errors. I can say that Hitachi Data Systems knows the rule: ‘always give customers more than they expect to get,’” - said Mr. Tibor Andráskó.
