Teba Bank, a provider of financial services to mineworkers and their dependents in rural and small-town South Africa since 1975, has implemented an HP Enterprise Virtual Array RAID storage solution to provide improved access speeds and greater storage flexibility. The project was carried out in conjunction with IT infrastructure, services and solutions provider, Datacentrix.
Says Hannes Potgieter, Teba Bank IT manager: "Teba Bank`s strategy in terms of IT has been to invest in an efficient IT and communication system to provide hi-tech real-time transaction processing solutions. In line with this, we decided that although our existing HP storage had served us well in terms of delivering a highly reliable and available infrastructure, our business had expanded at such a rate that it was impossible to forecast and plan disk capacity upgrades.
"Faced with the necessity of having to increase storage capacity yet again to cater for the expected increase in capacity in the short term, we decided to investigate a medium to long term solution for our storage requirements and opted for the EVA 5000 solution."
Teba Bank determined that the improved access speeds that can be achieved by the disk array technology would improve overall system performance. The EVA 5000 would also provide the ability to grow the capacity of the array online with zero downtime for the users. In addition, the increased throughput and capacity achievable with LTO tape technology would also assist the bank in completing backups and restores within an allocated six hour window.
According to Potgieter, the goal of the project was to implement a solution that would not only support the existing business requirements, but would also allow for the expected future growth of Teba Bank. "The Bank also needed a highly available, redundant environment that would enable it to run its critical banking application continuously."
"An additional requirement was to protect Teba Bank`s technology investment by using existing equipment where possible. Our recommendation of the EVA 5000 solution was based on the fact that it is a high performance, high capacity and high availability `virtual` RAID storage solution for the high-end enterprise class marketplace that removes the time, space and cost boundaries of traditionally architected storage."
Says Potgieter: "Our strong existing relationship with Datacentrix made it the ideal choice as technology partner for this project. Additionally, the company`s understanding of Teba Bank`s business requirements and fast, effective support were key considerations."
According to Datacentrix account manager, Kobus Smith, Datacentrix is the largest and only value partner with a direct contract with HP across the entire range of hardware products, including those acquired in the Compaq merger. "The company was named as HP`s first local Elite Storage Partner earlier this year, was titled as top local enterprise and corporate reseller more recently and also won HP`s award for best growth within the enterprise storage arena."
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