The Otkritie bank transferred an ITSM system to PostgreSQL

2017: Transfer of ITSM systems to PostgreSQL

The Otkrytiye bank transferred an ITSM open code system of OTRS to work with PostgreSQL. Transfer takes place within the strategy of optimization of cost of ownership of IT of infrastructure.

In an ITSM system 1700 services are registered, about 1000 contractors process over two million addresses a year. In peak hours more than 700 clients - employees of the bank work at a self-service portal. According to bank after transition system performance increased while the equipment remained the same.

"The bank not only transfers the existing systems from Oracle, but also at implementation of the new systems gives preference to use of PostgreSQL, - the CIO of Otkrytiye bank Kirill Menshov says. - PostgreSQL for usage time in bank proved as the mature industrial solution allowing to reduce significantly license costs and costs for technical support of databases without decline in quality".

Three more systems of bank are in process of transition to PostgreSQL.

The amount of data of a management system for the requests OTRS occupied 800 GB and was placed on the server with the 24-core processor. Procedures contained about 5,000 code lines, and reports – 10,000 lines. On PostgreSQL performance increased in a system translation result when preserving volume of the equipment. Stability of work and economic advantages confirmed expediency of the project for more than twenty other systems of Otkrytiye bank.

2016: Transfer of the first systems from Oracle on PostgreSQL

Otkritie bank translated the first three systems with DBMS Oracle on PostgreSQL, TAdviser in September, 2016 the technical director of bank told David Martirosov. On her the Service Desk system, the corporate knowledge base and one of the large infrastructure systems migrated, in particular.

Migration was complete in July. It was preceded by thorough training: the bank held stress testing, acquired examination on new DBMS, resolved the issues connected with information security. The information security standard had to be developed independently practically from scratch as in the Russian market still small examination on this DBMS, David Martirosov notes. After that within a month three systems were transferred to new DBMS at once.

PostgreSQL was unrolled on the same hardware where earlier Oracle DBMS was used. David Martirosov noted that in certain cases when moving with Oracle on PostgreSQL changes at the level of "iron" for its correct work can be required. It depends on architecture of the application: not any application is easy to optimize for work for PostgreSQL, especially it which was initially written under Oracle, the technical director of Otkrytiye bank explains.

PostgreSQL DBMS works steadily, there are no special complaints to it, Martirosov says. One of pluses of its use he called almost double increase in productivity of a system of the corporate knowledge base. Performance grew and at the Service Desk system, however, is not so considerable.

At the same time, according to David Martirosov, there are also PostgreSQL use minuses. One of them is that it is the database, different from Oracle, and experience of administration of the last not really strongly helps. It is necessary to raise examination in bank almost from scratch. The second minus is that in the market there are not a lot of strong experts in use of PostgreSQL on large corporate systems. Time was required to find the company which would provide migration support, David Martirosov tells.

One more minus – lack of operating experience of PostgreSQL in the large companies. It means that there is no documentation describing how to configure this database in such cases, there are no standards of security which are in detail describing how to protect this database, etc. According to Martirosov, this minus – temporary: as in the increasing number of the companies PostgreSQL is used, more and more integrators will have examination on this DBMS, this problem should be solved.

As well as earlier, the Otkrytiye bank is going to transfer all auxiliary systems to PostgreSQL further. According to David Martirosov, like those there will be about 20 systems. The key systems which were initially written under Oracle, it is not going to transfer to new DBMS.

2015: Plans for migration on PostgreSQL

David Martirosov told about plans to refuse use of Oracle DBMS in the greatest possible scales and to pass to PostgreSQL, at the TAdviser Banks IT Day conference in October, 2015. It was talked of transfer to this DBMS of noncritical IT systems.

"If to speak about infrastructure of all our organization, we systematically will refuse Oracle on the noncritical systems", - he said.

David Martirosov is going to transfer the noncritical systems of Otkritie bank to DBMS with the open code.

He added that completely it is not possible to refuse Oracle: "the system of processing of bank, for example, works only with Oracle, and there's nothing to be done, we will not risk so". On a set of other systems, having migrated on PostgreSQL, it is possible to achieve significant savings and more flexible approach, David Martirosov notes.

The open source software at that time was already used in Otkritie bank. For example,the ITSM system of bank created based on the solution OTRS. Its to one of the first it was going to transfer to PostgreSQL.

Martirosov noted that in the choice of this solution with the open code of any ideological background: "we not for solutions with the open code and not against them, just while we selected our system, OTRS more than the others conformed to our requirements for cost, flexibility, perspectives of further independent development".

The technical director of bank added that the large companies often are afraid to contact solutions based on the Open source software as face problems of scalability and performance. To show as far as the ITSM system of Otkritie bank is capable to meet the requirements of the large organization, David Martirosov provided data that in it 20 thousand unique clients, 500 clients at the same time work, in day in a system create 2.5 thousand requests.

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