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Maximum Business Impact: Punjab National Bank-Enterprise Mgmt System

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

The scale of Punjab National Bank's Enterprise Management System (EMS)

project can be gauged from the fact thatthe bank has 3,408 branches across the

nation (some of them at the remotest of locations), out of which 2,500 branches

are up with the Core Banking System.The bank cannot afford to let any of the

links to these stations go down for long, as this would affect the working of

the centralized banking solution. The purview of the project includes routers,

switches, servers, databases, mail applications and desktops.

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For example, if one of the routers gets faulty and the link goes down, the

EMS locates the problem in virtually no time, triggers alerts and you can even

repair it remotely.

PNB's CA Unicenter EMS has eight modules. These are as follows.

Network System Management: This monitors WAN links and provides

traffic/percentage utilization statistics. PNB has a four-tier full meshed

network architecture wherein the branches/offices are connected to a NC (Network

Center). These NCs are further connected to a ZNC (Zonal Networking Center),

which is connected to the DC (datacenter) at Delhi and the DRS (Disaster

Recovery Site) at Mumbai. Further, the DC and the DRS are connected through 27

Mbps fat pipe from different service providers.

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The branches/offices, NCs and ZNCs are connected with a lease line as primary

link and ISDN

dial-up as backup link. The branches generally use 64 Kbps bandwidth, NCs use

bandwidth in multiples of 64 Kbps up to 2

Mbps, while and ZNCs use 2 Mbps

bandwidth.





Mr Sidhu is a gold medalist in B Com and MA (Economics). He is also a CAIIB
from IIB and PG Diploma in Management from National Institute of Bank

Management, Pune. He is associated with various governing bodies like SIDBI

investment committee of SME Growth fund, Committee on IT and Business

Process Re-engineering, Inter-ministry Task force on Investment, etc


RIS Sidhu

General Manager -IT

Mr

Sidhu is a gold medalist in B Com and MA (Economics). He is also a CAIIB

from IIB and PG Diploma in Management from National Institute of Bank

Management, Pune. He is associated with various governing bodies like SIDBI

investment committee of SME Growth fund, Committee on IT and Business

Process Re-engineering, Inter-ministry Task force on Investment, etc

Service Level Management: This monitors and reports SLA data gathered from

different NC and branch devices. Administrators can define metrics to be

measured, measure on such metrics, and do comprehensive monitoring.

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Server Management: This module monitors and manages servers

for CPU, disk, memory and I/O

utilization.

The Database Management module is to monitor and manage the database server.

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Project Specs

Business Problem:
It was becoming difficult to monitor and manage PNB's

huge setup. The bank also wanted to improve uptime, so as to impart better

services to customers

IT Solution: Recruiting specialized

IT manpower at each of the locations would not have been the best of

available solutions. This solution offered them centralized viewing of all

IT



resources and an opportunity to


control and mend them

Impact: More than 99.5% uptime,

enhanced consumer satisfaction

Implementation partner: CMC, CA, HCL

Infosystems

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Help Desk Management: This module provides web-based

support to end users and helpdesk staff to open service requests and track

problems. It manages

requests, changes, knowledge and problems to be able to provide

support quickly.

Desktop Management: This

includes Asset Management, Software Delivery and Remote Control for Windows

desktops.

Web Server Management: This module monitors CPU, disk, and memory utilization of

Web servers. It also monitors critical services. Since the bank provides

services like Internet banking, manages additional delivery channels such as

ATMs and Kiosks, is a member of various electronic payment and

settlement systems like INFINET, SWIFT, RTGS, SFMS and EFT, and has 39

branches/offices enabled with videoconferencing facility, this module becomes of

utmost

importance.

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MS Exchange Management: This module monitors and manages mail traffic. It also

takes care of user quotas and disk space utilization.

Integrating such a mammoth

infrastructure and taking it to small and remote locations was a daunting task.

However, with the competent core team, vendors and consultants, PNB overcame the

challenge successfully. Talking of the effectiveness of the implementation, the

bank told us that after this implementation their process turnaround time to

address any

failure/problem of the link or

infrastructure has come down by

60 percent.

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