Virtualisation Led To A Consolidation Ratio Of 16:1

Saraswat Bank has clocked impressive growth in the last few years with IT proving to be the backbone of this performance. Shirish Sinkar, CTO/CISO and Senior VP - Saraswat Bank talks to Biztech2.com on the bank’s key IT initiatives ranging from virtualisation to the Oracle 10g implementation. Saraswat Bank, which has been at the leading edge of IT usage, has even commercialised its in-house IT efforts with its indigenously built core banking solution, viz. ‘Swift Core’, now being used by some of the other Co-operative banks in India.

What were the key drivers for virtualisation at Saraswat Bank and how has it benefited the bank?

‘Server Sprawl’ was hampering smooth operations at the bank. In 2007 we were running 60 different servers for running as many applications, and managing them was a difficult task. After virtualisation, they were converted into 4 blade servers and we were able to achieve a consolidation ratio of 16:1

High power consumption was another challenge and the servers were occupying considerable real estate space. Server virtualisation came to the rescue and helped in improving the performance of the servers and associated assets like power and real estate.

The reduction in manpower cost was also noticeable. The number of System Administrators has reduced from 4 to 1. Further, there is better management of control and security in a virtualised environment as compared to a distributed environment.

What has been your experience with virtualisation at the bank? Any challenges on the way?

Ours was a live scenario with 24/7 operations, and to transit from the existing legacy applications to a virtualisation platform was a challenge because there was no liberty to halt any applications.

Another challenge was to fit the virtualised platform into the bank’s specific information security policy. This was because we had different Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) and moving them on the virtualised platform was a cautious affair.

On the database side, the bank has transitioned from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g. What brought about this transition?

Saraswat bank was one of the first to run the Oracle 9i rack in India. However, the rack had its own set of challenges. It was not stable giving rise to problems for the DB administrator. There were other issues such as storage management, the plain text format of the data getting replicated from the Dataguard server to the secondary and DR server without any compression making it a highly time consuming activity. The load balancing features were also not good in the 9i rack.

These limitations were rectified by Oracle 10g. Hence, Saraswat Bank decided to move from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g. The key benefit was around load balancing. The enterprise manager in Oracle 10g is a very sophisticated tool. It has tuning, advisory and diagnostic services which has helped the DB administrator to do better database administration.