Britannia Building Society is extending its use of a
storage virtualisation tool that enables it to duplicate key
systems for investigating problems in a live environment without
affecting normal back-end services.
SVM, from StoreAge Networking Technologies, was brought in to
support Britannia’s core Fineos Banking platform, but it is now
being rolled out to other parts of the business, including the
management information system.
As SVM’s use is extended, it is replacing ad hoc database
cloning and file copying arrangements with an automated service
that can take a snapshot of a database far more quickly than
previous systems.
Paul Thomas, database services manager at Britannia, said, “SVM
enables the IT department to deliver business data for
customer-responsive systems in minutes, which is a significant
improvement.”
Thomas said the storage appliance’s other main benefit was that
it had greatly reduced the storage requirements of the database
copies taken, which was crucial for keeping a lid on Britannia’s
server requirements.
“It is also really low maintenance,” he said. “It just sits
there in and runs in the background, doing what it needs to do. All
we have had to do since installing it is to take on additional
servers periodically to cover growth.”
SVM runs in a five-server test environment. All the servers are
Sun Solaris, which are used exclusively across the
organisation.