The Ak Bars bank completed virtualization more than one and a half thousand jobs

On June 1, 2015 it became known of the project of virtualization of jobs in Ak Bars Bank. The project virtualizes workstations of managers on the Microsoft platform less than in a year without additional costs on licenses or new devices^[1].

Project Tasks

In 2013 "Ak Bars" with consulting support of PwC began the project on centralization of the operating activities which mentioned IT. At the last stage which the bank approached at the beginning of 2014 it was necessary to carry out centralization of IT infrastructure of the divisions which are directly working with clients.

Office of Ak Bars bank, 2014

"Perhaps, we considered all solutions existing in the market — Maxim Dubkov, the director of IT department of Ak Bars bank told. — Technologies were tested in laboratory of bank for compatibility with the available park of applications and with peripheral devices".

Project Progress

The IT command of bank found an optimal solution: for June 1, 2015 within the centralized architecture 71 banking applications function today, more than 1.6 thousand employees work with them.

"Final" was reached by solutions of two vendors and both technologies underwent full piloting in frontal divisions of bank in Kazan. After a careful miscalculation of an economic component the customer made a choice for benefit of a stack of technologies of Microsoft.

The bank decided to optimize and process the operating stack of infrastructure technologies Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2, in particular Windows 2012 R2, Remote Desktop Services, Windows 2 Go, for achievement of the same purposes for which "classical" VDI technologies are used.

Thin clients were not bought by bank. They were made of the available machines among which PCs were more senior than 7 years - from them just took out hard drives and installed new USB flash drives.

The Microsoft Windows To Go technology helped to construct in final workplaces architecture of the thin client for access to the virtualized terminal farms. After removal of the hard drive the role of "carrier" of the Windows system undertakes the personalized USB flash-carrier. The customized Windows 8.1 operating system plays a role of the thin client for access to infrastructure of applications. Such modification of jobs allowed bank not to update the PC park upon transition to the Windows 8 operating system.

Within the project the command of bank built the centralized infrastructure where in the environment Hyper-V 2012 R2 unrolled 28 terminal farms on the platform Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2. Each farm contains from 2 to 30 virtual terminal servers with cross reservation between 12 physical servers. Session access for 1600 virtualized jobs was organized in the failsafe mode through Connection Broker from clustered DBMS Microsoft SQL Server 2012. The project was executed by forces of an IT command of bank 4 months. The solution on the virtualization platform Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows To Go is unrolled in such scale for the first time in Russia.

"We did not spend kopeks for purchase of thin clients. We should make it if we selected other technology, for example "classical" VDI. Flash drives which we bought cost much less than the cheapest in the market of the thin client. During piloting we saw that the stack of infrastructure technologies of Microsoft together with the solution Windows To Go will allow us to reduce costs approximately by 10 times in comparison with any technology of virtualization of workstations" — Maxim Dubkov noted.

Testing of technology scale did not take place smoothly: when connected the most part of workstations to a system, at users problems with communication loss began to arise, and the number of appeals to technical support grew by 40%. Specialists of Microsoft helped to solve problems: after installation of the updates released by the company under the specific project on virtualization servers the problem was fixed.

Project Results

Centralization made more managed infrastructure of workstations, safe, less expensive in service. All project is implemented without attraction of external examination - forces of three people, staff of department of information technologies of bank.

Implementing technology and having refused a personal data storage on computers of users, the bank reduced risk level in the field of information security: data are controlled, reserved and stored in a private cloud of Microsoft Hyper-V. According to a technical guidance of bank, the project considerably raised a maturity of organization in terms of requirements to information security imposed on the Central Bank of the Russian Federation and other regulators.

"Microsoft helps the companies to follow current technology trends. So, with Hyper-V customers can build infrastructure which allows to virtualize applications and workloads. It not only increases efficiency and flexibility of a system, but also reduces costs of the enterprise — Arseny Tarasov, the director of the department of work with corporate customers and partners, Microsoft in Russia told. — Implementation of Hyper V in IT infrastructure of bank perfectly shows opportunities and advantages of virtualization, within the project more than 1.6 thousand machines were connected to an integrated system".

Notes