Nedbank in South Africa Selects Model9

When we look at the performance of one of our backups, a weekly backup, according to Nedbank. This backup has 733 volumes to protect.

The on-premise size of this was 7.82TB, in the cloud, it was 1.33TB giving us a 5.9x compression ratio.  Ordinarily, this job ran for almost an entire weekend, due to tape drive availability. After moving this onto Model9 Software, it ran for 36mn. We also found further benefits; the MIPS and the MLC license savings, we can realize that over time, and then that will benefit us, for future mainframe hardware procurements. We don’t need to buy Ficon cards any more.

Also, the cloud storage enables us, gives us a flexibility, to adjust the capacity requirements without a lock-in of physical on-premise equipment. It enables cost optimization with regards to tiering to core storage. And it also provides with the ability to optimize the method of backing up data resulting in the utilization of less storage in Azure.

Model9 enables Nedbank’s cloud transformation. It is automated, and we all know the amount of JCL changes that we need to do when we either have new volumes or we have to reclaim them. There’s no more of that. There’s a, improved RPO and RTO. And we have the ability to restore from anywhere.

I think one of the big factors in this was the Model9 team. They were involved in the business case development, assessment, and implementation, and they were at our backend call 24 hours a day. The biggest benefit that I saw was the excitement that this generated with the mainframe support team, they were given the opportunity to play in the cloud. And we’re not looked at as dinosaurs anymore.

If we take a look at our old infrastructure, we have the mainframe. Then we had a whole lot of VLEs and DSMs. We had ficon directors and we had a huge tape library. This was replicated at our DR site. We eliminated a lot of these components from both our primary and our DR site. And this gives us a new look, very clean look, the infrastructure with the agent, the Model9 agent running on z/OS directly on the mainframe using the ExpresssRoute to connect directly to Azure Blob storage, and with the option to tier it down for archive.

When we’re looking at the future, Model9 is a transformation software that we want to look at, and we want to use the data analytics capability of that and enrich our data lakes and the business intelligence processes with the mainframe data. Outside of the mainframe, we also want to look at our open systems environments, and we want to backup the on-premise open systems environment directly to cloud. We want to move long-term open system backups to cloud, and we also want to move file shares to cloud.

When we looked at the benefits of implementing Model9, we had no on-premise backup infrastructure anymore. It was no longer required. There were savings on hardware, licensing costs, cabling, power, floor space, cooling. There was a reduction in business disruption during tech refresh cycles. We all know the endless tech refresh cycles that we go through and the downtime that we are asked for to do this. There was a reduction in technical resource hours during tech-refresh cycles, savings on IBM software, on Oracle software, on BMC Control-T software, and on technical resources, labor, and overtime costs.

There was no requirement to have a dedicated DRL party to keep the tape management software updated. Neither was there a requirement to have an active z/OS LPAR at the DR site. There was also no need for a DR LPAR at the DR site during DR tests. The backup data is available from Azure in ZA North. 

From a performance point of view, the backup jobs using the backup infrastructure don’t anymore wait for tape drive availability while there is improved elapsed time for the backups. Improvement in elapsed time had a positive effect on the batch window and the ability to come online earlier. The shortened backup windows also opened up additional MIPS for other processes and workloads to be used.

Nedback Background
The Nedbank group is one of the largest financial services groups in Africa. It offers wholesale and retail banking, as well as insurance, asset management and wealth management services and solutions. In South Africa, it has a strong franchise evidenced by 19% deposit and 19% advances market share. Outside of South Africa, it operates in 5 countries in the Southern African Development Community, through subsidiaries and banks in Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Eswatini, and Zimbabwe. In Central and West Africa, It has a strategic alliance with Ecobank and has representative offices in Angola and in Kenya. Outside of Africa, it has a presence in key global financial centers to provide international financial services to Africa-based multinational and high-net-worth clients. Nedbank has the total assets of $80 billion, total deposits of $64 billion with 28,324 employees, and 7.6 million clients.