Lloyds Banking Group Wholesale Markets Treasury and Trading, a
division of Lloyds Banking Group, is reviewing the software
applications in use across the bank in an attempt to cut the
spiralling costs of storage following its merger with HBOS.
The bank's storage requirements have grown from 4Tbytes of data
to more than 300Tbytes in the space of four years, but Lloyds plans
to introduce storage tiering so that less-essential data is stored
on lower-cost discs.
"We are classifying all applications across Lloyds and HBOS and
identifying the level of service business managers actually want,"
said Jonathan Harris, senior storage engineer at Lloyds
Banking.
The biggest challenge for the IT team is in explaining to
business managers how much the service level agreement they require
for their applications will cost them, he said, speaking at Storage
Expo in Olympia, London.
"The concept of different levels of performance and resilience
don't fit in people's awareness," he said.
Lloyds uses a simple form of charge-back to charge business
units for the hardware their applications use.
As a financial institution, Lloyds has a bigger IT budget than
most users, but Harris said the bank was looking for efficiencies
and aimed to reduce IT costs.
After experience rapid growth in demand for storage, Harris said
it was difficult for the company not to make a knee-jerk reaction,
and simply grow its expensive fibre channel storage infrastructure
to support the business.
"We put everything on fibre channel. But the merger with HBOS
has meant we have had time to work on a project to structure our
data and we are looking to implement a storage tiering
structure."
Lloyds is introducing SATA low-impact drives for unstructured
data. It also using tiered storage from HDS to move applications
dynamically up and down between fibre channel and lower-cost
storage, depending on the performance requirements of the
applications.
"Our business goal is to pay out less for high-performance fibre
channel discs."
The strategy could help reduce the cost of running applications
because they only run on high-performance discs when it is needed,
he said.
Lloyds uses F5's Acopia file virtualisation product, which
monitors where files are located, enabling IT managers to put
policies in place to manage storage and backups.
The bank runs its disaster recovery in a virtualised environment
to reduce costs further.