12th January 2000 — The Royal Bank of Scotland today announced the successful implementation of another component of its assured disaster recovery solution, through an agreement with Hitachi Data Systems worth over £2.5million. The disaster recovery project puts The Royal Bank of Scotland ahead in its industry and marks another success in the Bank's history of technology innovation.
Jeff Chalmers, head of central infrastructure management IT services, Royal Bank of Scotland comments, "Our business customers range from small businesses to large Corporates and the data systems are responsible for processing millions of customer transactions per day. With that amount of data running through a corporate system, state-of-the-art storage and recovery techniques are imperative."
Chalmers continues, "The new recovery project has been designed and implemented firstly to achieve flexibility for any new services that the Bank decides to implement and secondly to ensure real time mirroring of data across all existing services. The new systems enable us to have consistency across all divisions and will dramatically reduce disaster recovery times."
Phil Jones, director, architecture and technology, Hitachi Data Systems added, "The Royal Bank have implemented a large scale project that puts their disaster recovery processes ahead of the competition. As the banking industry changes so fast, the Royal Bank needs to know its IT infrastructure is flexible enough to support any business changes and increased data volumes - especially from the growing online banking market. The storage solution that the Bank has chosen is both flexible and scalable, and has non-disruptive copy capabilities that are superior to any of its competitors."
Traditionally, recovery systems have consisted of creating back-up at the end of each business day and as a result of this any new service launched or developed required a separate disaster recovery solution. These methods, although secure, are time consuming and result in differing business recovery processes.
In 1998, The Royal Bank moved its back-up data site from London to Edinburgh, creating a production data centre spread across two sites, either side of the city. The main production site is responsible for the major processing workload of the Bank on a day-to-day basis. The second site is primarily responsible for testing and development, but the production loads switch to this site in the instance of any failure of the main processors. Having both sites in the same city means it is possible to deploy a disaster recovery solution across the two sites simply and effectively using fibre technology.
The storage solution provided by Hitachi Data instantly mirrors all the Bank's data between both sites in real time. This storage subsystem combined with IBM's GDPS™ (Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex), Hitachi Data Systems technical services and Inrange fibre connectors provide a reliable assured disaster recovery solution linking the Bank's data centres that are 11-12 kilometres apart.
Chalmers concludes, "A true assured disaster recovery project involves real-time mirroring of data from a range of sources with the capability of instant cut-over from production systems to back-up systems should a fault ever occur in the production centre. A secure online system is essential, both for added peace of mind for our customers, and to keep us at the forefront in our industry through innovative technology."
The Royal Bank of Scotland, founded in 1727, is one of the UK's top 50 companies, and, with assets of £80 billion, is Scotland's largest bank. It has 650 branches throughout Great Britain, around half of which are in Scotland. It operates internationally, with offices in North America, the Far East, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, Greece and the Bahamas. The main business areas of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group include the UK Bank, serving retail, business, corporate and institutional customers; Direct Line Group, which is the UK's largest private motor insurer; and Citizens Financial Group, a retail and corporate bank operating in New England, USA. A strategic alliance with Banco Santander of Spain provides scope for development of banking and financial service activities across Europe including the cross-border banking service IBOS. In 1996 the Group entered a long-term strategic partnership with Scottish Widows, and in 1997 it announced the creation of Tesco Personal Finance, a joint venture with Tesco PLC. The Royal Bank of Scotland Group has share listings in London and New York.
Recognized as a leading provider of business solutions for the world's most IT-intensive corporations, Hitachi Data Systems offers professional services, multi-platform storage subsystems, and the industry's broadest line of high-performance servers. The company's extensive range of products and services, coupled with its business alliances with key industry leaders, enable it to transform IT into business agility for high-end and middle-market customers. Hitachi Data Systems is owned by Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) and has its headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
Contacts: PR: Hitachi Data Systems
Hitachi Data Systems is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex™ and GDPS™ are trademarks of IBM Corporation.
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