Johannesburg, 03 Dec 2015
The client
Nedbank Group is one of South Africa's four largest banking groups as measured by assets and deposits, and is listed as a JSE Top 40 company, with a wide range of wholesale and retail banking services. Nedbank is well positioned in commercial property finance, insurance, business banking, investment banking, vehicle finance, card acquiring, deposit taking, and asset and wealth management. The bank has a strong wholesale business, is growing its retail franchise and has a growth-orientated strategy which is underpinned by a strong drive into the rest of Africa.
Nedbank Group Technology is the Information Technology Division of the Nedbank Group, and its strategy is to leverage technology to enable Nedbank to be Africa's most admired bank. Within Group Technology, the Infrastructure and Operations Division provides hardware and software solutions and support as a service to the rest of the bank.
The challenge
Nedbank Group has traditionally used Oracle StorageTek equipment as the backup standard for its IBM mainframe environment. The solution that was originally deployed was a combination of Oracle VSM5 and SL8500 with 9840D tape drive technology.
Nedbank has experienced a steady increase in demand for backup processing due to the rapid growth of data as well as increased awareness of the need for data protection. Due to the exponential growth of data, Nedbank was battling to keep up with the backup demands of the business.
"These demands, combined with diminishing backup and batch windows, put huge strain on the existing mainframe backup solution at Nedbank," explains Darius Harris, IT Manager for Nedbank Group Technology.
In May 2014, Nedbank released a formal RFP to IBM mainframe backup solution providers for an optimal and sustainable solution to meet current demands and anticipate future requirements in line with the bank's technology strategy.
The solution
After careful evaluation following an extremely stringent selection process, the RFP was awarded to Storage Technology Services (StorTech) for the procurement, implementation and ongoing support of an Oracle VSM6, VLE (Virtual Library Extension) and SL8500 Tape Libraries technology solution.
StorTech and Nedbank share a long-term vendor and service provider partnership. StorTech has provided and supported Nedbank's physical tape technology since the late 1990s, which started with the first generation of VSM. More than two decades later, Nedbank is still pioneering the way forward with StorTech, as this is the first VSM6 Oracle implementation in South Africa.
"StorTech is the only Oracle (StorageTek) partner in southern Africa with the full capabilities, experience and expertise to deliver and support this solution," contends Harris. "Prior to the Oracle VSM6 implementation, we worked closely with StorTech and Oracle. We wanted to ensure that our meticulous planning would lead to absolutely zero downtime at both the production and disaster recovery sites during the implementation, cutover and migration phases of the project."
The implementation was successful and no impact to the existing production environment was experienced. Thus far, StorTech's solution has successfully met all of Nedbank's requirements. Since the implementation, the backup processing execution time and throughput performance have outperformed the times experienced in 2013 despite the massive increase in data requiring backup.
The results
The Oracle VSM6 solution aligns with Nedbank's strategy by contributing to the group's RSS (rationalise, standardise and simplify) principles. The solution proposed by StorTech met the following criteria:
* Cost
* Availability due to non-disruptive upgrade
* Scalability
* Longevity with a five-year roadmap for the technology deployed
* Flexibility of technology to use data de-duplication selectively
* Flexibility of technology to selectively store data on physical tape if required
* Capacity on demand and a non-disruptive capacity upgrade model
* Ease of implementation and migration
* Onsite implementation with local and international expertise
"The results were better than we could have anticipated," concludes Harris. "Physical tape footprint has decreased by 50% across the production and disaster recovery sites. New technology is leveraged from the virtual tape. These results were achieved while also gaining the benefit of increased processing performance, which affords Nedbank quicker access to frequently required data and allows for longer periods of data retention."
StorTech has over 50 years' combined experience dealing with supporting and designing StorageTek solutions. Initially a distributor of StorageTek solutions, StorTech has maintained and grown its skills through the purchase of StorageTek by SUN Micro Systems and thereafter by Oracle.
Over the years, StorTech has evolved to stay relevant and supportive of its customers' demands. It continues to invest in its individual engineers and engineering capability. Its engineers have a sound foundation of the supported technologies and have evolved to understand and deploy the new technologies without disruption to active production environments.
As the only certified field delivery partner for Oracle/StorageTek VSM in South Africa, StorTech is uniquely positioned to deliver leading-edge mainframe solutions into the local ICT marketplace. StorageTek/Oracle's tight integration with the z/OS mainframe operating system provides ease of management and highly flexible solutions to address mainframe backup and batch processing requirements. The technical team involved with Nedbank has been instrumental in taking Nedbank from the first-generation Virtual Storage Manager (VSM1) through to VSM6.
StorTech's in-depth knowledge of Nedbank's environment enables it to address the bank's ever-changing needs and growth in the data protection environment. The introduction of the VLE (Virtual Library Extension) has added additional flexibility to the VSM solution by catering for a tapeless solution utilising de-duplication (optional) to save on storage costs, while fitting seamlessly into the current environment to provide a mixture of tape and/or disk storage to cater for Nedbank's needs.
StorageTek/Oracle's industry-leading tape libraries and drives ensure data protection catering for explosive data growth. The introduction of StorageTek T10KD drives (8TBs Native) has secured the bank's investment in the SL8500, enabling Nedbank to free up capacity for future backup projects.
Client recommendation
"StorTech has built up Nedbank-specific knowledge, experience and expertise over the years that we have worked together, and it has ensured that Nedbank has access to dedicated hardware and software engineers as and when needed. We value the relationship we have established with StorTech for this reason. We believe that it is the only Oracle partner in southern Africa with the capabilities and experience to deliver and support this solution," says Harris.
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