Server Consolidation

Continued from page: 4

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

HDFC Bank's Migration to IBM p570

Scenario: HDFC Bank runs corporate banking business on FlexCube sourced from iflex Solutions while it uses CashTech Solutions' flagship product called 'CashIn' to manage its cash business. These systems not only run the processes smoothly, but also interface with various other systems in the bank. The existing Alpha server infrastructure was not geared to meet the bank's aggressive expansion plans and a growing customer base. With expanding operations and scaling up of the corporate banking and cash management systems, the bank required additional infrastructural support that would optimize the systems and future-proof the bank's IT investments. They needed a solution, which would provide greater infrastructural flexibility, and better manageability and handling of peak workloads, at the same time offering significant performance improvements. 

IBM proposed a solution built around the advanced POWER5 processors and the scalability of the IBM system and its virtualization capability fitted the requirements perfectly. Based on IBM POWER5™ processors with simultaneous multi-threading and a unique scalable, building-block packaging, the p570 that HDFC used is well-suited for server consolidation projects, database management, etc. The solution was designed to be capable of consolidating database over highly available servers, with separate partitions housing different instances; offering a totally redundant automatic fail over, configured to support both Oracle RAC and non RAC environments; handling scalability, expansion and increase of workloads. Best-of-breed technology and server consolidation approach was used, offering the best system performance on standard benchmarks (TPC-C, SAPS, etc.).

The project took less than a year to come to action. It was initiated in August 2004, within a month the solution was finalized, and it was ready in March 2005. The lifetime of the project is expected to be 4-5 years, after which it would be reviewed again.

Architecture: IBM's p570 servers are configured in the HACMP cluster environment. Two such servers are placed at the primary site and one at the DR site. All the servers are connected to the SAN Switches, which in turn are connected to the Hitachi storage for production/DR environment and IBM storage for UAT environment. The solution has been configured with redundant paths with no single point of failure in the connectivity to the storage and the network. Veritas Netbackup solution has been implemented for efficiently taking backup copies of databases on Gen3 LTO tapes. CA-Unicenter agents are configured on the servers for online real-time monitoring and proper escalations for proactively managing these servers are defined.

FlexCube migration involved a complex qualification on Oracle 9i on IBM AIX 5.3 platform. Forms 6 migration to 6i, business objects migration to latest supported version and a whole lot of load-testing scripts using rational tool, and so on. Similar exercise was carried out to certify CashIn on the new platform.

Value propositions:

• IBM solution offered a clear roadmap of p5 technology. The new processor and hardware and was well suited for scaling along with the Bank's growing business.
• With superior architecture of IBM POWER5 & Oracle 9i, a performance 2-3 times with lesser number of CPUs was achieved. The software licensing cost reduced to a sizable extent at the same time offering a low-cost path for future growth.
• With IBM's dynamic reallocation of resources and on-demand computing, the problems of the tackling peak loads have been addressed. IBM solution also offered the technological superiority of virtualization, allowing the bank to create pseudo-servers within servers by logically partitioning the servers and dynamically assigning resources. This allows the bank to automatically manage the loads at peak hours by spreading it across unutilized resources from other partitions. 

With inputs from GSV Surya Prasad, Vice President IT, HDFC Bank

Page(s)   1  2  3  4  5