He wears the IT hat at a fast-growing private sector bank in India, which interestingly comes with an over eight decades old lineage. Catering to the need of both consumer and corporate clients, the bank strives to maintain a robust technology platform supporting multi–channel delivery capabilities while it enjoys the patronage of several lakh customers across India through a network of 271 branches and over 168 ATMs spread over 14 states and 1 union territory. B.Murali Nair, Chief Technology Officer, Lakshmi Vilas Bank has recently attempted to consolidate all its business databases into one single platform by acquiring an Enterprise Storage Solution which is a centralized system that the bank will use for managing and protecting vital customer data.
LVB has also upgraded its Core transaction Server from IBM P5 series to IBM P6 series box and integrated with Hitachi Storage Solution.

Here’s more on the new initiative.

What pushed hitting this storage refresh button?

We are basically embarking on two projects now. One is storage and the other is about existing servers. It is a much larger project wherein the entire database is distributed and brought under one storage platform. It will connect MIS, off-site surveillance and compliance related work and would basically give a lot of competitive advantage. All databases would come to one place.

How does it move on from your legacy environment, specially with your bank’s long lineage?

We had multiple databases for various applications, emails, peripheral work etc. Now, all are going to converge into one storage platform. Also, it generates MIS reports for departments as they want along with product testing advantage. Otherwise, the waiting time was too long.

How do you interpret storage and control areas in today’s era of clouds?

Anything lying outside is not that welcome, to be candid. We are also concerned about security because we deal with big money here.

And what’s the influence on Disaster Recovery areas?

It stays robust. We can easily switchover, can have multiple copies, besides having a point-in-time copy available all the time Also the new environment has the capabilities of virtualization so it will be able to virtualize existing storage as well. Now we are protecting our existing investments as well as continuing to use fresh assets.

Your top expectations from this investment?

It will enable and consolidate all data, will provide testing ease, will give faster turnaround on new product concepts, generate better MIS reports and improve performance, productivity and profitability across all bank branches.
This solution will not only lead to an efficient management of critical data but will also enable the bank to embark upon projects like data warehousing, data mining, business intelligence and channel integration (SOA) thereby paving the way for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This new Storage infrastructure will further help LVB to meet BCP strategy in an effective manner.