Sometimes, it takes more than a single disaster recovery (DR) site to counter disaster—one of the reasons why Corporation Bank chose to add to its disaster recovery setup. Corporation Bank, founded
Requires Free Membership to View
in 1906 in Udupi, is one of the oldest Indian public
sector banks. It currently operates from branches across India, with more 12,000 employees. With
growing business volumes, though the bank already had a primary DR site at its headquarters in
Mangalore, in 2009 it decided to go in for a nearline DR
setup.
The bank's data center is located in Bengaluru. It chose to have a nearline disaster
recovery setup about 40 km away from the data center. Explains S Kumar, assistant GM, IT,
Corporation Bank, "If a disaster strikes at the data center, I will be in a position to quickly
operate from my nearline
disaster recovery setup. It is much easier to transfer data from the nearline site to the data
center, than from the DR site." The data center and the nearline site are linked by high bandwidth
connectivity. External consultants were involved in searching for a site for the nearline facility,
and its set up.
Essential care was taken in terms of selecting
sites for both the data center as well as the nearline disaster recovery setup. Says Kumar, "We
had to keep three things in mind. First, that neither facility should be located in a prominent
place which is susceptible to attacks. Second, that neither of the sites should be susceptible to
flooding. Third, that there should be availability of power all the time, and that it should be
possible to get power from two different grids." As of now, there are sufficient UPS systems to
take care of the power requirements. Corporation Bank has redundant generators for uninterruptible
power supply. N+1 redundancy is being used.
In all the places, enterprise-level storage subsystems have been installed. The storage in use is
from Hitachi Data Systems. For all transactions that are taking place, synchronous replication is
performed between the data center and the nearline disaster recovery setup. The disaster
recovery setup uses a leased line as well as MPLS cloud on the connectivity front. All the
replication is storage-based and not host-based; thus, box-to-box replication is taking place. The
lag between the data center and
disaster recovery setup is virtually zero, because a bandwidth of around 45 Mbps has been
provided.
Corporation Bank's disaster
recovery setup is an exact replica of the primary site. According to Kumar, "The only
difference between these two is that there is site-level redundancy at the data center." The data
center's two servers are in active/passive or active/active mode. The bank relies on the Sun server
platform. The DR site has a single server for the core banking system application, while there are
two servers at the primary site. Comments Kumar: "Right at the inception stage, we chose to design
an extremely lean data center architecture, rather than build a server farm." The recovery point
objective (RPO) for the disaster
recovery setup has been finalized at 30 minutes, and recovery time objective (RTO) at an
hour.
When it comes to security, physical access, logical access and network access have been ensured.
Apart from that, Corporation Bank recently went in for an e-digital signature initiative. On the DR
front, a regular DR drill is ensured every six months. "Right now, we are happy with our disaster
recovery setup," says Kumar. "Future customer needs will guide us to the next move."