Raiffeisenbank completed transfer of users to jobs of VDI

On May 12, 2015 there was Sergey Kvashuk, the vice president, the Head of Department of management of basic IT infrastructure of Raiffeisenbank,^[1] told of an implementation project of virtual work places]. More than 10 thousand users are transferred to VDI technology. Works in the project were continued more than three years. Works are performed by the staff of IT departments of bank.

Project Tasks

The important role in decision-making was played by several factors:

• the five-year cycle of operation of the capital customer premise equipment - workstations, monitors, licenses came to an end. The equipment was required – to change decision-making, i.e. to buy, install new workstations, or to transform a workplace of the user, improving utilization properties and reducing costs for his support.

• in 2014 Microsoft stopped support of Windows XP within standard conditions, it was necessary to change the operating system for new that attracted need of upgrade of jobs.

• the bank did a great job on transfer of IT processes of regional divisions on outsourcing and simplification of procedures of technical support for decrease in number of appeals to the outsourcing companies, reduction of number of the failures and failures requiring a call of specialists outsourcers was required.

At the same time business set a task: "facilitate" departments – to reduce the cost of their contents and to reduce the areas. Earlier at each small office of bank there were a premises with the server hardware which was required to be serviced. It was necessary to refuse these server rooms.

Office "Raiffeisenbank", 2014

All listed reasons indicated implementations of VDI technologies the need.

In Raiffeisenbank very complex structure of applications and organization of a workplace of the employee. Applications, the bank equipment, a cash window are tied to a certain workplace. Such mode of the VDI organization when virtual workstations are issued to the employee for all the time of work in the company was selected. It increases load of infrastructure, but does not require transformation of push technologies of the software and change of business processes of support.

Project Progress

In implementation process of the project there were problems of technical character. The workplace of each employee needs to be stored in data center of bank, the employees more than 10 thousand that requires about 1 PB of memory on flash-DWH. Hundreds of thousands of input-output operations on record, on reading generate huge loading, and at the time of start of the project in the world there were few technological solutions which could provide such capacity on flash-DWH.

Having let to different tricks: use of different sets of disk arrays, flash-DWH, technologies of hardware compression, program systems of deduplication, in bank received very difficult and unhandy architecture from a set of diverse components that predetermined failures in work of a storage device subsystem of workstations.

In 2014 in Russia there was a solution XtremIO of EMC and the decision on EMC XtremIO acquisition was made.

Implementation of EMC XtremIO took place quickly. The bank purchased a system from four modules X-Bricks - two clusters, each of them was set in two data centers. Within several days transferred to them the VDI platform, all 10.5 thousand workstations.

Project Results

By words Sergey Kvashuk, effect was shown at once.

"We got rid of failures, problems with performance, problems of technical character. At the same time we released tens terabyte on flash-arrays. Due to deduplication, compression and thin selection we found room for 1 PB of workstations in 15 TB actual volumes of DWH of XtremIO. For us it is very good result", - Sergey Kvashuk, the vice president, the Head of Department of management of basic IT infrastructure of Raiffeisenbank noted.

Notes