AIB tightens up on storage

Pro

1 April 2005

The purchasing by Allied Irish Banks (AIB) of the 9840 high-density tapes storage system by StorageTek has enabled the bank to continue exploiting a ten year investment in its tape-management systems.

AIB has some 380 branches and outlets in Ireland, north and south. In the UK it has another 70 premises. The successful introduction of telephone and Internet banking have also led to requirements for 24 hour systems access, significantly reducing the overnight backup window.

According to Paul O’Neill, AIB’s technical support manager: ‘AIB has seen a significant increase in both personal and corporate business over the past few years. In addition to provoking an increase in requests for customer data, the customer information itself has expanded beyond traditional account details and name and address.’

In common with many large financial institutions, AIB has a heterogeneous IT infrastructure that supports the group’s activities in Ireland and Britain. The branch network runs on OS/2, while new customer service and marketing applications are developed for Unix or NT platforms. However, the core retail banking applications remain on the traditional mainframe platform, using CICS, IMS, DB2 and MQ Series.

The increased business activity has had a significant impact on AIB’s data storage capabilities. According to O’Neill: ‘We retain the core customer databases on the mainframe, duplicating to other systems as required. We need the storage capacity to meet business developments and backup and recovery as well as full disaster recovery.’

The group now has 10 terabytes of mainframe data alone. O’Neill said: ‘AIB’s challenge is not only to support this growth while meeting the increasing demands of the business but to manage the storage with the same number of people and tight control over costs.’

Key to this control is the implementation of automated storage technology. Ten years ago AIB purchased its first StorageTek tape silo to support a new ‘dark site’ data centre. Since that time, AIB has added three further silos and exploited improvements in tape technology to support business growth. ‘A key element of the dark site was to have an automated solution that required little manual interaction,’ said O’Neill.

An important technology adoption has been AIB’s move to 9840 high density tapes from StorageTek. According to O’Neill: ‘The introduction of StorageTek 9840 tapes was a big change for AIB, providing 20:1 or even 30:1 compression. This has enabled us to manage significant data growth within the same infrastructure. Without this technology we would have had to add at least two more silos and, with limited space in the data centre, that would have been a significant challenge as well as cost. The introduction of the 9840s has enabled AIB to maximise our investment in StorageTek technology.’

Having introduced 9840 tape technology on the mainframe platforms, AIB decided to deploy it across its other IT platforms, including Unix and NT as well as the OS/2 branch systems. ‘The flexibility of the StorageTek solution is extremely valuable to AIB,’ he says. ‘The ability to exploit our 9840 expertise across the company is extremely important.’

AIB is also using StorageTek technology to support its open systems needs. StorageTek’ partner in Ireland, Xnet implemented and maintains a cross-site storage backup system enabling AIB to perform mission critical data backup across its datacentres in Dublin. It comprises two StorageTek L700 tape libraries and 9840 tape, allowing 8s file access, and drives with a capacity of 7TB.

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