Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Adopts IBM XIV

IBM Corp. announced that Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has selected IBM XIV Storage System Gen3 as an infrastructure component for its ongoing development and delivery of customer-focused business applications.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, which owns and operates Bendigo Bank, Adelaide Bank, Sandhurst Trustees, Leveraged Equities, Bendigo Wealth, Rural Bank and Oxford Funding among others, is the first Australian organisation that will deploy the recently announced XIV Gen3 disk storage systems.

"We were already familiar with the technology and benefits of the IBM XIV Gen2 units, which we use in our Bendigo data centre," said Greg Smith, Storage Team Leader at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank. "The new IBM XIV Gen3 units will provide us with the capacity to deliver and maintain significant performance improvements as our storage utilisation grows, without storage issues. We expect to see considerable benefits, including improved and consistent application response times."

Critical to the bank’s success, the XIV Gen3 units will be deployed as part of a set of upgrades, which includes new IBM SAN Volumes Controller nodes, to improve capacity for Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s customer service operations. The storage systems will support file/print applications, Exchange, SQL databases and backup and recovery applications. As new customer applications were deployed the Bank observed a steady increase in IO load and storage server CPU utilisation, an issue which the two IBM XIV Gen3 units, coupled with new SAN Volume Controller nodes, will address upon implementation.

"Our objective is to be the number one customer-connected bank in Australia," Smith said. "The main thrust of application development has been around knowing and understanding customers better, and delivering applications which provide better services to them."

Building on the previous IBM XIV systems, the IBM XIV Gen3 models are optimised for cloud computing and virtualisation, providing the bank with room for service expansion in the near future without the economic and environmental costs of extra hardware.

"We’re able to consolidate our storage requirements into a smaller number of controllers on the floor," Smith said. "The IBM XIV Gen3s will ensure performance improvements in our applications, allowing us to provision storage quickly so that the bank can continue to grow, within its current data centre footprint. "We have been impressed with the seamless installation process, which allows us to leverage the new infrastructure well before the peak Christmas period. This is a credit to the ongoing relationship between Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, IBM and business partner, ISI."

"The team at ISI has a deep understanding of both Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s infrastructure needs, as well as a breadth and depth of the IBM product portfolio. We work diligently with the bank to ensure that their customers receive the best possible banking experience, whether that’s in a branch or online, through a high-performance IT infrastructure," said Tom Kolder, National Leader Enterprise Systems of ISI Pty Ltd.

"We have a strong relationship with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and were able to offer flexible storage solutions to meet the bank’s needs not only today, but also in the future," said Joe Screnci, Storage Business Unit Executive, Systems and Technology Group, IBM Australia. "Designed for ease of use, XIV delivers consistent high performance without manual tuning for even the most demanding workloads. We are delighted to work with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and help support its application development to better service customer growth."