About China Development Industrial Bank
Founded in 1959, China Development Industrial Bank has grown to become Taiwan's largest direct investment institution, with capital of approximately 92.6 billion New Taiwanese Dollars (US$3.1 billion). The Bank employs about 600 people and serves over 400 corporate clients in Taiwan, mainland China and the wider world.
Challenge
China Development Industrial Bank uses a wide range of trading and investment services in global financial markets. To manage its operations, the Bank relies on its IT systems, most of which run in Microsoft Windows on Intel processor-based hardware.
"As an industrial bank, our main business income is long-term investment and financial commodities trading," said Ms. Ailan Zhang, Vice President of China Development Industrial Bank. "Any interruption to the availability of our IT systems is potentially very serious. For this reason, we wanted to implement a flexible recovery solution that would be widely applicable to the existing systems make it quick and easy to protect our systems against disaster."
The Bank's previous backup processes varied from system to system. Restoring some systems could even take more than a day, and required considerable manual work. In many cases, it was also necessary to maintain two servers for each system: one to run the production workload, and the other purely for disaster recovery. The Bank wanted to find a more flexible and cost-efficient solution.
Novell Solution
The IT team at China Development Industrial Bank began investigating its options for creating a single, standardised recovery process for all its core Microsoft Windows servers.
"One of the major selection criteria was VMware integration," said Mr. Fengde Lin, Senior Manager at China Development Industrial Bank. "We have VMware virtualised servers and traditional dedicated servers, so it was important that the new solution should be able to manage both physical and virtual environments. We tested products from several vendors, and compared to these other products, PlateSpin® Protect from Novell was the best option for our environment. We also felt that it offered excellent price-performance, stability and ease of use."
The Bank bought 36 PlateSpin Protect licences and quickly completed the installation and protection setting. The whole project-from the initial Novell bid through to the go-live-was completed within just six months.
"We use PlateSpin Protect to create scheduled virtual replicas of our business-critical production systems," said Ms. Ailan Zhang. "When considering the implementation of recovery tools, we need to reduce the impact on normal operations: the synchronisation takes place while the servers are still in active operation. PlateSpin Protect is able to complete the system protection work without affecting normal business operations. If a production server fails, we can simply switch to the replica and bring the system back online within about twenty minutes."
Since the solution only needs to update the replicas with new or changed data, the tool requires much less system resource, execution time and bandwidth than a traditional approach, which would require the transfer of a full copy of all data.
"PlateSpin Protect minimises the impact of recovery processes on the rest of the IT landscape, which improves overall performance," said Mr. Fengde Lin. "Moreover, because the process is completely automated, it reduces workload for our IT teams, and avoids the risk of human error."
Results
With PlateSpin Protect from Novell, China Development Industrial Bank has created a single, standardised recovery solution for all of its most business-critical Microsoft Windows systems.
"Instead of a complex process where each system has its own recovery plan and lengthy recovery process, we now have a single, simple method for protecting our systems and data," said Ms Ailan Zhang. "If one of our production servers develops a problem, we can restore it with just a few mouse-clicks-easily within our corporate recovery time objective of 20 minutes."
Since PlateSpin Protect creates hardware-independent virtual replicas of the production servers, there is no need to maintain specific dedicated servers for each system at the disaster recovery site. In fact, the Bank only needs one physical server for every 15 replicas-so hardware costs are considerably lower than a traditional disaster recovery solution.
"We have now successfully used PlateSpin failover during several system breakdowns," said Mr. Fengde Lin. "The software is easy to use, and will save a lot of time—not only in the event of a disaster, but also in terms of day-to-day administration. Although previously it was possible to convert physical servers into virtual servers, each conversion required a complete replication. By contrast, PlateSpin Protect makes it simple."
Now that the Bank has standardised its recovery processes with PlateSpin Protect, it has a more coherent strategy for future IT growth.
"We want to create a modern, flexible infrastructure to support the business as it expands into mainland China and internationally," said Ms. Ailan Zhang. "PlateSpin Protect from Novell is an important tool for helping us to achieve this."