Overview
Established in 1984 as Family Finance Building Society, Family Bank Limited is now ranked as the fifth largest bank by branch network, valued at USD 812.7 million as of by December 2015. With slightly over 87 branches, the bank also holds USD 119 million in shareholder’s equity (Mutegi ,2016).
About 2.5 billion gigabytes of data is generated daily globally, with an unquantifiable amount of this data generated mostly from daily financial transactions using various platforms such as mobile money, ATM and online banking.
Historically data was collected and stored through repeated vigorous processes, but the demand for simultaneous collection and access has become the challenge for most organizations.
The need to have quick access to centralized data and legacy storage systems are inefficient and speedily obsolete. The issue of security of this data also needs to be considered as per the Data Protection Bill (2013) legislated in Kenya. Therefore a solution that incorporates both capacity for high volume data collection, quick retrieval with minimum latency and security is a necessity for financial institutions.
The Family Bank Limited Data Storage Problem
Using legacy brand data storage which had issues of slow processing also on auto-support and with the intention of incorporating a hypervisor into their storage environment, Family Bank Limited started their journey of upgrading their storage environment through the assistance of Gestalt Gild Limited’s data storage team.
EMC VNX 5800 Storage Solution with RecoverPoint
Designed for midtier-to-enterprise storage environments, the EMC VNX series implements a modular architecture that integrates hardware components for block, file and object with concurrent support for native NAS, iSCSi, Fibre Channel and FCoE protocols.
The series also provides flexible connectivity options via UltraFlex IO modules for both the File data movers for NAS connectivity and the block storage processor for FC iSCSi host connectivity.
The intelligent use of Flash, coupled with linear scalability allowed Family Bank Limited to right-size their infrastructure. This, with further research can prove to reduce costs and ongoing costs on their data center environment as clearly highbred flash storage systems offer unmatched scalability, agility and efficiency capabilities for a business looking to consolidate their IT infrastructure.
A proven case has shown the VNX 5800 storage solution, configured with FAST VP and FAST Cache to manage SSD and tiering allowed businesses to reduce latency to a measurement of 2ms.
RecoverPoint on the other hand, is a continuous data protection solution with multiple recovery points offered by EMC that supports asynchronous and synchronous data replication of block based storage.