How does SVC manage explosive growth?

THANE, INDIA: Consider the statistics:

The year 2002: Shamrao Vithal Co-operative (SVC) bank, an urban co-operative bank started with 200,000 customers across 38 locations in India, and revenue of Rs 2,000 crore.

The year 2015: The bank has metamorphosed into a large conglomerate of Rs 20,000 crore with more than 11 lakh customers across 180 locations. These include 85 other co-op banks (including 493 branches) that have hosted their core banking solution, and 45 others that are completely hosted on the SVC data center.

With the exponential growth in business, rose the needs for statutory reporting, regulatory reporting, internal control reports and also internal reports to facilitate marketing and business development. Plus the IT organization was also developing in-house applications keeping in tune with the latest interactive technologies in the banking sector.

Saving with virtualization:

As a part of cost optimization, SVC decided to virtualize its servers and storage at the new site in Thane.

The bank partnered with its storage vendor NetApp, and reduced the number of servers from 85 in 2012 to 6. It also saves 25-30 percent on its IT expenditure annually because of the move. While NetApp takes care of SVC’s storage needs, it has partnered with IBM for compute, Microsoft for SQL database software and VMware for virtualization.

“The VMs at the DR site have been given the same IP address as at DC site,” Ravikiran Mankikar, Chief General Manager, Information Technology, SVC, mentions.

Data center migration:

It’s been nearly two years since the 108-year old Shamrao Vithal Co-operative (SVC) bank, migrated its 500 sq ft data center from Vakola in the western Mumbai suburb to 1,500 sf ft tier-3 data center in Wagle Estate, an eastern suburb in neighboring Thane.

According to Mankikar, “We wanted to scale-up the infrastructure to accommodate a fully integrated data center and DR sites to avail state-of-the-art technology to address dynamic business needs and consolidated infrastructure for on-demand IT workloads, along with reduced IT operational cost and business continuity.”

Therefore, while all the banking operations were shifted to the DR site, the compute servers were shifted from Vakola to Thane. The storage, in the meanwhile, continues at old DC at Vakola and data is replicated in a reverse manner from DC to the DR site.

Challenges resolved:

According to Mankikar, data management was a big problem. “With expanding operations, data was also growing exponentially. Secondly, to remain competitive, we had kept the data ready for easy availability, and at the same time, control networking cost without compromising on data security.”

Due to multiple delivery channels each having its own uptime and security requirements, it was important to meet regulatory compliance requirements. “It was important to put in place an effective business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.”

The bank has developed standard, improved, comprehensive IT workload offerings, and provides an integrated, harmonized platform. Secondly, it has rationalized its storage portfolio against the disparate, multiple systems earlier implemented by SVC.

“We can deliver Zero RPO and Near Zero RTO between the DC and the DR locations,” Mankikar claims.

The future:

Mankikar concludes: “Our philosophy is to get as much automation as possible, and our corollary includes automated services as well.”