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Case Study: Data security applications retain customer trust at Karnataka Bank

THE ORGANIZATION

Founded on the coastal banks of Mangalore, Karnataka Bank has become a name to reckon with in India's financial sector. With an 85-year banking history and a network of 456 branches, the bank has become synonymous with reliability to many of its 4.5 million customers. But with that trust comes responsibility. "Our banking environment requires real time access to information with no room for data loss," says Ananthakrishna, non-executive chairman, Karnataka Bank.

The Business Case

Handling and ensuring the safety of a sprawling database of 4.5 million customers is hard. So much so, that the Reserve Bank of India passed a regulation two years ago, urging banks to conduct frequent disaster recovery drills to ensure zero loss of customer data. Karnataka Bank had a disaster recovery process in place, but it wasn't the best. "It would take four to five hours just to initiate the recovery process at the DR site," says Anantha Padmanabha Upadhya, assistant GM IT at the Bank. "When we conducted DR drills, the results revealed glaring loopholes. "A recovery time objective of four hours was becoming unacceptable to the bank and Upadhya knew something had to be done.

It wouldn't be an easy problem to solve. The bank has multiple delivery channels including its branches, ATM, website and SMS banking and each channel housed its data separately. As the bank grew, the silos of data made consistency hard to achieve. Data backup and restoration operations also took hours and brought the bank's database to a halt, affecting core banking operations. Upadhya had another worry. A poor recovery point objective left a window open for data loss. "Data lost in transit is irretrievable. This would seriously compromise our credibility," he says. Upadhya realized that the problem lay at a fundamental level. The existing DR setup involved data replication at the application level, resulting in multi-application data copies. The bank's applications, which included core banking, were slowing down the replication process. "What we needed was a consolidated IT infrastructure at the primary datacenter to facilitate centralized data replication at the DR," explains Upadhya. This would reduce complexity, time and effort and shut out the possibilities of human error.

The Project

Weighing all his options, Upadhya turned to a three-tiered storage solution. The new setup created a bunker site between the primary datacenter and the DR site. This near-line datacenter operates synchronously with the main datacenter so that every transaction is updated in real time. The remote datacenter, in a different city, operates in an synchronous mode, completing the set up. This three-way DR solution creates a foolproof strategy against any sort of disaster. The near-line datacenter is located in the same city as the primary datacenter to avoid any latency, since data is transmitted synchronously to both sites. When the primary datacenter goes down, the near line DR datacenter takes over and starts syncing with the remote datacenter and incrementally replicates every last change to the main DR site.

The system uses a universal replicator that can work in a heterogeneous environment and with multiple applications. In addition, the re-sync feature provides the bank with concurrent multi-site replication capability and enhances data protection. Further, a split-mirror mechanism provides a rapid disk mirror of production data by copying only incremental changes within the local storage system. The process rapidly creates multiple copies of critical data that can be recovered in a disaster. In addition, it enables the logical partitioning of ports, cache and disk capacity. The system has built in redundancies at every point to ensure a resilient storage based DR infrastructure.