Business issues
HDFC Bank, like most banks in the industry, operates on a tight efficiency bandwidth. Historically, information at the data center was stored on 200-plus digital audio tapes (DATs). These media were cumbersome and costly to operate and maintain. Their unreliability and the maintenance of a backup of 500 servers made it physically difficult for HDFC to rely only on DATs for its future needs. As HDFC Bank expanded into multiple market segments and opened up new delivery channels to its customers, processing and storing the voluminous information generated at every transactional stage made it increasingly difficult for the bank’s IT team to continue with the legacy storage solution. Furthermore, the bank deployed a range of applications that needed to be released to end-users on an ongoing basis. It was just a matter of time before it began scouting for a “leaner” solution that was more economical, efficient and reliable.

Solutions
Given the criticality of backing up applications and 3 terabytes of daily customer data, the company placed reliability, scalability and system robustness at the top of its list of requirements. Other parameters that were equally considered were global standards of the product and seamless interface with systems. To meet HDFC Bank’s backup requirements, Sun Microsystems® recommended a StorageTek storage area network (SAN) -based, local area network (LAN) -free backup solution comprising a StorageTek L700e tape library single-frame configuration, digital linear tape (DLT) drives, and backup software from VERITAS and event management integration using Unicenter TNG 3.0.

Business benefits
Streamlined and unified storage and backup operations Efficient and economic automated backup of mission-critical information Improvement in staff and IT department productivity Considerable savings in storage costs Lower seek times Backup time reduced by 80%