National Bank of Ukraine (IBM System Storage DS8800)

On April 3, 2012 the national bank of Ukraine and IBM corporation announced project completion on upgrade of the infrastructure of storage integrating information on electronic payments, correspondent accounts, the bank reporting and also the normative reference information of bank. The latest model of a storage system of IBM System Storage DS8800 became a hardware basis of the platform which is responsible for storage and transfer of financial information. Project implementation will allow bank to provide reliable storage and processing of critical financial information.

The project is implemented by forces of the business partner of IBM, Integrity Vision LLC company.

The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) is the central bank of Ukraine which exclusively performs issue of national currency and organizes its address, installs a system, an order and payment methods, including between banks, sets for banks of the rule of carrying out banking activities, exercises bank regulation and supervision, currency control, performs licensing of banking activity.

Rapid growth of arrays of diverse information along with the need for uninterrupted and operational interaction with all banking system of the country set the task of increase in capacity and performance of the corporate data warehouse for IT department of bank. With respect thereto the decision on upgrade of storage systems was made. Performance measures, fault tolerances and fast recovery in case of refusal were key selection terms of a hardware platform.

"We were faced by a responsible task – to select a system for data storage of information systems of the National Bank of Ukraine, – the director of the department of information technologies of the National Bank of Ukraine Bilash Alexey told. – The effective storage system was necessary for us for work with huge amounts of data. Quality improvement of data management at continuous growth of information was one of the main tasks of this project".

Solutions of IBM which successful experience of an ekpluatation in bank contains more than 5 years satisfied to indicators of energy efficiency and performance shown by bank to storage infrastructure. For ensuring the maximum disaster tolerance the complex of storage systems of bank consists of two territorially spaced arrays. DS8800 model provides high performance thanks to more high-speed controllers, adapters a host systems and devices and also to SSD solid state drives and the hard drives Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) of 6 Gbps. The IBM System Storage Easy Tier component helps to optimize performance of applications due to automatic placement of data at appropriate levels of storage.

Comment of the leading specialist of Technical department of Integrity Vision LLC Andrey Roshchenko: "Implementation of this solution is intended to come to replacement to first generation of DS8000 family which is successfully used in the National Bank of Ukraine for more than 5 years. IBM DS8800 represents fourth generation of family of disk storage systems of data of DS8000 and is the most reliable and productive IBM System Storage in a product line. Experience of specialists of Bank confirms correctness and correctness of the choice of storage system of IBM DS8000 for consolidation and ensuring safety of the major data".

"Experience of IBM in creation of solutions for the bank industry contains decades, – Penko Dinev, the CEO of IBM Ukraine noted. – The new storage system of IBM System Storage DS 8800 is one of the fastest and effective today, having "smart" performance. The DS 8800 systems are ideal for the financial sector imposing increased requirements to reliability, scalability, high-speed performance and profitability of IT systems".

The project was begun in November and is complete in December, 2011.