ICICI Bank : Enterprise Storage Management

The Bank has numerous high end, critical applications running 24 X 7 on its

servers in the datacenter. These applications affect 20 million of its customers

and so providing uninterrupted services is of paramount importance. With retail

customer accounts, ATM + POS (point of sale) transactions, call center contacts

and credit transactions run into millions each day, you can well imagine the

kind of stress on the Bank's storage systems. So, it decided to implement a

centralized storage solution to cover all critical areas such as core banking,

credit cards, Internet banking, retail loans and overseas operations. The entire

storage has been architected to provide a response time of less than 15 ms for

all transactions. Other benefits of such a solution include reduction in cost of

maintenance, backup and recovery, rapid provisioning, deployment and maintenance

in current environment, easy transition from current storage environment to

another without any changes to the application, failover capabilities, use of

virtualization techniques for savings on infrastructure and interoperability of

data. And because of completely centralized enterprise storage, the bank expects

savings from reduction in local storage requirements to the tune of 10%-12%.