Brocade Restructures HDFC's SAN

In 1994, HDFC bank became one of the country’s first private-sector banks. With an aim to become the preferred provider of banking services for retail and wholesale customers, HDFC bank has built sound customer franchises across district business to achieve healthy growth and profitability.

HDFC has always prioritised its engagement in technology as one of the key goals for attaining growth and has already made significant progress in web-enabling its core businesses. The bank is currently using a Storage Area Network (SAN) solution utilising six Brocade SilkWorm 48000 Director core fabric switches, ten Silkworm 4100 Director switches, and multiple smaller switches.

Data Storage Issues

HDFC has developed a network of 531 branches in 228 cities in India, as well as 1500 ATM sites, all linked in real-time to accelerate the flow of data and transactions. The bank intends to have a presence in all major industrial and commercial centres where its corporate customers are located, and build a strong retail customer base for its deposits and loan products.

As the bank’s core business and banking operations grew, so did its storage requirements. When divisions within the enterprise needed additional storage, more servers and edge switches were added to the SAN. This made managing and maintaining the entire SAN infrastructure a challenge.

Brocade – The preferred partner

To address its storage needs, HDFC Bank examined solutions from Cisco, McData, and Brocade. The first two presented the firm with an array of systems and touted their features. Brocade, however, promised unmatched support services and SAN expertise, the industry’s only 4 Gbit/sec solutions to meet ballooning storage needs, easy, cost-effective migration to greater performance, interoperability in mixed-vendor environments, proven reliability and ease of management.

“Brocade first considered how the business actually works before offering the solution. When it proposed a new storage architecture based on the industry’s leading core switches, complete with substantiated technology proof points, we knew we had a partner. We now have an architecture that is orderly and structured precisely to our business needs. Additionally, because the design is so logical, we now can identify the source of any issues as soon as they arise,” explains Harish Shetty, senior VP, HDFC bank.

With support from Brocade engineers, HDFC bank redesigned its storage infrastructure to streamline traffic flows. It bolstered the core by deploying six Brocade Silkworm 48000 Director solutions all linked on a single fabric.

HDFC bank installed ten Brocade SilkWorm 4100 Fibre Channel switches to connect application servers and storage devices, and will deploy more systems as its storage needs increase. These high-availability devices support 1, 2, and 4 Gbit/sec speeds, making them backwardly compatible with the firm’s legacy switches. Additionally, they provide ports on demand, allowing administrators to scale the platform’s 16 ports to 24 and then 32 with simple license activations.

The bank also used the Brocade Advanced Zoning feature that is supported by the Brocade Fabric OS, to localise traffic on the fabric.

According to Shyam Gopal, regional manager, Brocade India, “We don’t operate directly with our clients, but do so through our OEM partners. Hitachi and SUN Microsystems were providing our products and services to HDFC. We were more of an evangelist there than a vendor, doing consulting and advising the bank officials as to what would be the best for them. We focused on the pain points that the bankers were facing on a daily basis.”

Brocade also provided HDFC Bank’s IT staff with technical training on operating its SAN, as well as other services and resources.

Storage Infrastructure more dependable now

Brocade has restructured the bank’s SAN to localise traffic on a single fabric, increased the throughput and number of available ports, and has expanded its storage capacity.

As Shetty observes, “Since the implementation of Brocade, we have been in a position to achieve better performance, scalability and effectively achieve disaster recovery. We have also been in a position to reduce the time to market for our business as we are able to provision disk resources much faster, effectively and efficiently.”

Today, the firm is effortlessly archiving three terabytes of data every day. Users within the enterprise can access stored data rapidly because of the SAN’s far more efficient design, ensuring they always provide customers with the finest service. Moreover, the entire storage infrastructure is more cohesive and dependable, eliminating the many technical issues that threatened to reduce the availability of the system as well as income-generating banking operations.

“By providing us with a vastly improved architecture and the industry’s only 4Gbit/sec technology, Brocade has given us the performance, reliability, and investment protection that a financial institution of our size requires. Because of enhanced productivity and lower operating costs, we project a fairly shorter return on investment. For us, Brocade proved that it understands storage technologies and business uses better than any other vendor. Brocade will be a trusted partner as we become a major player in global financial markets,” concluded Shetty.