Hitachi Data Systems Storage Is Centrepiece of Disaster Recovery Solutions For Sweden's Vardepapperscentralen and Royal Bank of Scotland
14th June 2000 — Hitachi Data Systems today announced that two large European financial institutions have selected its flagship storage product, the Hitachi Freedom Storage™ 7700E, as the key component in their leading-edge implementations of business continuity solutions. Both the Royal Bank of Scotland and Sweden's Vardepapperscentralen (VPC) bank have based their multi-site disaster recovery solutions on the use of IBM®'s Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex™ (GDPS™) solution and the 7700E.
GDPS integrates S/390® Parallel Sysplex® technology and remote copy technology to enhance application availability and improve disaster recovery. The use of GDPS and Hitachi Freedom Storage together allow customers to meet these demands more effectively than any other solution.
Many other companies worldwide have echoed this conclusion. According to Josh Krisher, Research Director at Gartner; "As of 1 January 2000, there were 16 GDPS configurations in production worldwide. Most use Hitachi Data Systems disks." Source: Storage Technologies, Operations & Resources Service, April 2000.
Vardepapperscentralen Installs Hitachi Storage in GDPS Solution
Vardepapperscentrallen (VPC), jointly owned by the four major banks in Sweden, handles transaction information for the Swedish stock market and money markets.
The pressure on VPC increased significantly with the initial public offering of the National Swedish Telecom, Telia, on the Stockholm exchange. During late May and early June approximately 15,000 new securities accounts were opened every day.
When VPC decided to upgrade its storage infrastructure and implement IBM's GDPS solution, it concluded that Hitachi storage was the only offering that could meet its requirements. "Operational security, capacity and the capability for working with GDPS were the most important reasons that we selected Hitachi," said Bertil Thörnqvist, Vice President, Production and Technology at VPC. "We need to have direct access to all information about securities and their owners. In practice all data must be available in real time. The different parts of the system must be capable of being separated by a considerable distance and still operating entirely in parallel. GDPS makes it possible for us to swap primary systems automatically and very quickly if it should become necessary."
The system changeover was accomplished over one weekend in May this year and took place without any problems. "The whole process, from delivery to on-line operation, took only three and half weeks. This is excellent evidence that Hitachi has the capability to manage such important, demanding projects," concluded Thörnqvist.
The disaster recovery solution at the Royal Bank of Scotland is implemented across two data centres situated more than 11 kilometres apart. The GDPS™ offering was designed and installed by IBM consultants, and runs on Hitachi Freedom Storage 7700E subsystems.
Jeff Chalmers, head of central infrastructure management IT services, Royal Bank of Scotland, commented, "In the financial industry, downtime and lost data are costly, both in financial and customer service terms. We needed to ensure that we had an instant backup of our data. When we decided to implement a solution to provide remote dual copy across our two data centres, the GDPS solution was the best choice to meet our high objectives.
"We chose Hitachi storage because it is more reliable and robust than IBM's product, and provided a complete openness that EMC storage does not have. The openness was key as the storage had to work effectively with the GDPS solution from IBM. During evaluation, we found that EMC's storage not only was less cost effective, but also only offered a proprietary mechanism for dual copy, which we felt would leave us very tied in and we would risk large inter-operability issues when implementing the complete solution."
"Since working with Hitachi, we have seen real benefits. The Hitachi storage provides high availability and reliability - exactly what we need and we now have effective remote dual copy with complete integrity guaranteed for all our data. We are on target to go live with the complete business continuance continuity solution in August 2000. In the future we anticipate any shutdown to be vastly shortened and aim to reduce restart times from the traditional 24- to 36-hour period down to between two and four hours and also ensure that the quality of our data is protected."
In today's world of banking and financial services, both business pressures and governmental regulation demand that the recovery of key applications be completed within a few hours.
With these solutions from Hitachi Data Systems, customers are able to maintain full integrity of their data and to recover applications in record time, no matter whether the outage is planned or unplanned.
Phil Jones, director of architecture and technology, Hitachi Data Systems, has been overseeing the implementation of GDPS on Hitachi storage at installations around the world. "Businesses cannot afford to have lengthy interruptions to their critical applications - as has been illustrated recently during several prominent IT failures," he said. "Industry analysts estimate that the cost of an outage for a retail broker, for example, is somewhere between $6 million and $7 million per hour. Using IBM's GDPS offering in tandem with Hitachi storage offers the best performance, the highest availability, and the most open solution for those installations wanting protection of their critical applications."
Committed to helping customers exploit the value of information technology for success in the Internet economy, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), is a leading provider of business solutions for the world's most information-intensive corporations. For further information on Hitachi Data Systems, access www.hds.com.
Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 1998 (ended March 31, 1999) consolidated sales of 7,977 billion yen ($65.9 billion). The company manufactures and markets a wide range of products, including computers, semiconductors, consumer products and power and industrial equipment. For more information on Hitachi, Ltd., please visit Hitachi's Web site at http://www.hitachi.co.jp .
¹ At an exchange rate of 124 yen to the dollar.
Contacts: PR
Hitachi Data Systems is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. Freedom Storage is a trademark of Hitachi Data Systems. IBM, S/390 and Parallel Sysplex are registered trademark of IBM Corporation. GDPS and Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex are trade-marks of IBM corporation. EMC is a registered trademark of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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