TamilNad Mercantile Bank Deploys WDS Appliances
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Jan 8, 2007

As part of its disaster recovery project, the TamilNad Mercantile Bank, (TMB) Ltd. has deployed wide area data services (WDS) appliances to protect data.

TMB will deploy the solution and maintain the data center at its office in Chennai and the disaster recovery center at Bangalore.

Venkatesan, Asst GM, TMB, says that the disaster recovery system will prevent data loss. Riverbed's Steelhead appliances are a critical component of the bank's architecture.

"We are very happy with the performance of these appliances. We are planning to deploy these at strategic branches across India to improve banking applications and e-mail across the WAN," he states.

During peak business hours, TMB generates a 100 MB log file every five minutes. To protect this critical banking transaction data, TMB replicates the files from its Chennai data center to its Bangalore disaster recovery center. Prior to installing Riverbed's Steelhead appliances, replication of this file using Oracle's Data Guard application took more than 10 minutes. If a disaster were to hit during peak business hours, TMB risked losing over 200 MB of data. The company turned to WDS vendors for a solution and selected Riverbed's Steelhead appliances over the competition.

Venkatesan informs, "The shift from Oracle to Steelhead has increased our application performance between distributed sites by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times between enterprise data centers and remote offices. WDS appliances will enable us consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, improve staff productivity and collaboration."

"If a disaster were to strike the bank, we stand to lose over 200 MB of data," he adds, and explains, "The time to replicate transaction data took 10 minutes. It has now dropped to two minutes. Data traversing the wide area network (WAN) dropped by over 65% and WAN utilization is down to less than 50%."