HDFC banks on disaster recovery

HDFC Bank is one of IndiaÂ’s largest financial institutions, with a network of 1,412 branches and 2,890 ATMs over 528 cities throughout India. Having experienced the benefits after the deployment of an advanced Sanovi DR Management Suite, HDFC Bank, is now proactively capitalizing and managing disaster recovery (DR) environments, which ensure business managers that applications can be recovered in compliance with service level agreements. To manage the whole implementation Sanovi partnered with Wipro to provide monitoring, managing, troubleshooting of DR Continuity using SanoviÂ’s unique product line called Disaster Recovery Manager tool.

CUSTOMER CHALLENGES
Deepak K Mudalgikar, VP, IT, HDFC Bank is known to be a man with a mission in the CIO community. His mission here was to ensure that HDFC Bank’s IT has a disaster recovery plan that works and meets business needs. His end goal simply stated is to recovery within set time objectives and provide seamless transition of application services to 25,000 of the bank’s end users. Mudalgikar has been stewarding the bank’s disaster recovery project since it started. "“We realized early on that the right way to approach this problem was to deploy a management framework that masks technology complexities and provides operations staff real-time visibility into DR solution’s health,”" said Mudalgikar.

"“There are lots of tools in the market to monitor and manage a production environment, Sanovi’s software is the only one that interfaces with systems across 2 or more sites to give DR monitoring and management capabilities in a single dashboard, their approach to DR is impressive,"” mentioned Mudalgikar.

Finally, the bank decided to deploy Sanovi solution. "“The reason of choosing Sanovi DR Management Suite, was to implement comprehensive family of enterprise-class DR management software solutions for validating, monitoring, testing and automating recovery,”" he further said.

THE SOLUTION
The bank has its primary data centre in Mumbai and its remote data centre in Bengaluru. The application environment is a hete ro generous mix of Unix and Windows platforms, SAN-based storage and 3-tier appli cation architecture. Synchronous block-based replication is deployed to a near site and asynchronous replication to the remote site. File-based replication is used for applications with recovery point of more the 60 minutes. Oracle, Sybase and MSSQL databases are in use for various applications.

The bank has key processes in place to effect change management on the primary and remote systems. These were largely manual processes that required project management and co-ordination amongst various stake holders. DR drills are the surest way to check for application recovery readiness, the challenge in doing DR drills more frequently is the time and resources required to prepare and execute a drill. After a detailed study of the technology and features of all available options in the market, bank chose SanoviÂ’'s DRM product as its DR management framework.

SOLUTION BENEFITS
Starting with recovery, workflow library gave bank the headstart that was key to meeting DR solution deployment project timelines. Every supported DR solution signature in the product, ships with fail-over workflow for application recovery and switchover and switchback workflows for DR drills. Using these workflows ensured that the solutions deployed by the bank followed industry best practices and recovery automation had met software quality control metric. The bank used this opportunity to review their current solutions and processes, further custom business process that are specific to the bank were easily added by extending the out-of-box workflow.

THE OUTPUT
"“Application fail-over that would take 2 hours earlier now happens in 20 minutes using Sanovi’s DR automation engine, our recovery confidence level is phenomenal. We are no longer dependent on the right person being available to recover the applications, it happens at the press of a button,”" said Mudalgikar. “

"Given the bank’s success with ensuring recovery readiness for critical applications, the bank is deploying several more essential applications under Sanovi DRM software management,"” said Lakshman Narayanaswamy, co-founder and VP (products), Sanovi Technologies.

Sanovi DRMTM combines monitoring, reporting, testing and work flow automation capabilities of complex IT infrastructure into a scalable, easy-to-use solution built on industry standards. The result is a unified disaster recovery management product family that delivers real-time DR readiness validation and offers clear business and operational advantages.

ROLE OF SOLUTION PROVIDER
Sanovi brings world class products using industry best practices to solve issues like realtime visibility into DR metrics, automation, simplification of DR Drills, reporting, and central DR console for enterprise wide collaboration and control for an effective DR implementation in the IT infrastructure arena. “"The customer has reached rich dividends in terms of increased operational efficiency, lower costs of operations and reduced time frame to install efficient DR implementation for his business continuity and time to market,”" said Apurba Dutta, head, sales, enterprise services division, Wipro Infotech .