As UniCredit Bank started parallelism of calculations

On October 12, 2015 the SAS company announced project results on a clustering and creation of the high-performance corporate data warehouse on the SAS Grid Manager platform in UniCredit Bank.

Project Tasks

To keep business development and to minimize a set-up time of the obligatory reporting, IT specialists of bank needed to provide high fault tolerance of the data warehouse, to reduce technological hazards and costs on technical maintenance.

UniCredit Bank (2013)

In 2013 the allowed time of idle time of services of the data warehouse before complete recovery of its working capacity in case of global failure (RTO) was 24 hours, depth of an inconsequential loss of data in case of such failure (RPO) also 24 hours.

Business challenges required decrease in the first of these indicators till 1 o'clock, the second - to zero.

For optimization of IT infrastructure, the device of reliable protection against failures and ensuring high speed of execution of transactions the bank began search of the solution which automatically recovered loading of the data warehouse and automatically restarted processes in case of failure. The solution should allow an ability to manage Ошибка цитирования Отсутствует закрывающий тег </ref> and acceleration of loading of the data warehouse.

Estimating possibilities of the platforms presented at the market specialists of UniCredit Bank stopped the choice on SAS Grid Manager which met all imposed requirements without exception.

Project Progress

Project implementation of upgrade of storage is carried out in several steps. The first stage, it took about three months, the system design is executed.

Then unrolled the SAS Grid Manager platform - about two months.

Migration of a core of storage on the created platform. To provide the speed and the continuity of loading processes of data, at the following stage loading processes were optimized taking into account new opportunities of SAS Grid. After complex testing for compliance of the optimized system to technical specifications the platform was brought into operation.

Project Results

For October 12, 2015 SAS Grid Manager works in an operating mode less than a year. According to the results of operation of the solution the bank noted:

• growth of data processing rate by 36%
• time of processing of tasks for 41% was reduced,
• waiting time of tasks was reduced by 68%.

The coefficient of parallelism of processes increased from 3.58 to 5.17. In addition to achievement of target indicators of an allowed time of idle time and recovery time of a system and data, the volume of expenses on purchase and maintenance of the equipment decreased. And the main thing the bank had a possibility of almost unlimited horizontal scaling of storage using an inexpensive server framework of standard architecture.

"The UniCredit Bank is one of our key clients. In 2012-2014 in bank on the SAS platform the corporate data warehouse and a number of business solutions for risk management and marketing campaigns were built. Transition to the latest Grid-platform demonstrates that the bank remains one of technology leaders in the Russian market and continues the innovative development, cares for stability of business processes and safety of information. It affects not only internal processes of bank positively, but also quality of customer service", - Yuli Goldberg, the director of work with the financial sector of SAS Russia/CIS company noted.

"Implementation of SAS GRID allowed us not only to increase performance of ETL, but also to provide the high level of fault tolerance of the corporate data warehouse. And it, in turn, allows us to provide the high level of service for all our clients. Successful implementation of such solution, difficult and innovation for banking sector, became possible thanks to the high level of professionalism of colleagues from SAS Russia company and to excellent, harmonious interaction between them and a team of IT specialists of bank", - Mikhail Dugayev, the director of the department of information technologies of UniCredit Bank told.

The project in UniCredit Bank is the first implementation of SAS Grid Manager in Russia and the first transfer of IT infrastructure of bank to high-performance parallel computings.

Use of the SAS Grid Manager tools increased data processing rate, increased the number of at the same time executed transactions, reduced an allowed time of idle time of service since day till 1 o'clock, reduced to zero data loss probability in case of system failure, reduced costs for purchase and support of the hardware of storage.