Indian Bank Collaborates With IBM To Deploy Flexible, Secure Compute Infrastructure

IBM announced that it has collaborated with Indian Bank to accelerate its modernisation path with flexible and secure compute infrastructure for deploying new front-end banking applications, while addressing the business growth of core banking solution workloads for the bank.

As part of its Project Paradise, the public sector bank wanted to consolidate its front branch servers for greater manageability and availability at both data centres and disaster recovery centres, while also running its CBS workloads on the latest generation of IBM Power servers.

“As part of our capacity management initiative and to manage evolving application requirements, we wanted a cloud-like functionality within our own data centre. With benefits like better flexibility, lower costs and enhanced security, we are creating a value-oriented solution by setting up a proactive and cloud-like model for the bank,” said Deepak Sarda, chief general manager-IT and partnership, Indian Bank. 

In order to meet Indian Bank’s digital infrastructure needs, IBM suggested a hybrid cloud solution for all Advanced Interactive eXecutive, or AIX, workloads to increase agility and presented a combination of capex and opex models for consumption of compute resources.

According to IBM, the solution will offer infrastructure-as-a-service and aims to deliver capabilities including extra compute and storage, creation of a private cloud using available resources, building a single pool of processors across data centres and disaster recovery centres, and services similar to pay-as-you-grow models.

“With the proposed private cloud solution, we aim to achieve better agility, scalability and security to meet our growth requirements and adopt a consumption-based IT solution that is required in today’s dynamic, hyper-competitive market,” Sarda said.

To streamline and enhance security for its private cloud and gain better support for compliance audits, Indian Bank is using IBM PowerSC for all AIX endpoints. The bank has also implemented IBM PowerVC for simplified virtualisation management, cloud deployments, workload image management and dynamic resource optimisation for IBM AIX servers.

Power Enterprise Pools will allow the bank to provide a single pool of compute resources throughout its data centre and disaster recovery sites. According to IBM, this will enable more efficient utilisation of available compute resources and help lower the bank's total cost of ownership.

The new cloud environment provided by IBM incorporates features such as virtual machine replication for consistency, a self-service portal for streamlined provisioning, and capabilities such as virtual image capture, deployment and cataloguing. Consolidation of front-end branch servers will enable Indian Bank to improve manageability and availability at its data centres in Chennai and Mumbai.

“Evolving customer needs demand a new operating model for banks driven by a nimbler digital environment. Those that embrace new technologies to modernise can gain a significant competitive edge, build market differentiation through innovation and prepare themselves for the new financial frontier,” said Viswanath Ramaswamy, vice president-technology, IBM India and South Asia.