Allied Irish Bank Got Four HDS Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Arrays

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation is working with Allied Irish Bank plc (AIB) to enable its digital banking services by transforming its data center.

This comes under the bank’s strategy to transform its internal process, as well as offering new and innovative banking services to its customers. AIB has teamed up with Hitachi to simplify its existing multi-vendor storage estate and consolidate over 14 storage arrays into just four storage arrays using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP).

AIB has also adopted Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS), Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), and Hitachi Command Suite (HCS) technologies at its data centers.

AIB wanted to assure a quick response to business growth and to support the cutting-edge banking technology it is rolling out to its end users. The solutions portfolio from HDS gives AIB greater visibility of its data, making it easier to manage and allocate storage capacity. With the consolidation and transparent storage delivery, AIB is on track to attain considerable cost savings over five years.

AIB selected Hitachi NAS to manage increasing data growth and offer scalability and tiering. The Hitachi Content Platform will help AIB efficiently scale business-critical information, keeping costs down assuring that the company can manage services and capacity more effectively. The Hitachi Command Suite unifies management across the entire solution set as AIB can maximise return on storage assets, and minimise operational costs. It also gives AIB a more efficient way to manage virtualised storage and lets IT to spend time on other business critical operations.

AIB benefits from performance visibility via a dashboard interface not only for the IT department, but also to the different lines of business across the entire bank.

Charlie Doyle, senior manager of IT division, AIB, said: “The two companies entered into the partnership to deliver a leading edge storage environment that would support AIB’s technology strategy. The migration from our existing storage platforms to our new Hitachi environment was key while delivering to the bank’s agile change agenda.”

Both parties believe that the new environment will service the bank’s evolving change and technology strategy over the next five years.