Operating Efficiencies and Savings in Data Center Standardization

Executive Summary

Overview
Shinhan Bank, part of the Shinhan Financial Group, has grown from a two-branch private bank in 1982 to one of the largest banks in South Korea. Headquartered in Seoul, the bank’s strategy is to grow through acquisition and added services. Its acquisition of Choheung Bank in 2003 doubled the size of the organization. To accommodate ongoing growth and achieve the vision of being a world-class bank with all best-practice systems required that the company reevaluate its information technology (IT) environment.

Barriers
The bank’s rapid growth led to an extremely large increase in transaction volumes, stretching the bank’s servers and data storage systems. The infrastructure was heterogeneous and widely distributed, and the bank lacked centralized visibility into its data center operations. In particular, key IT work processes were excessively time consuming and cumbersome, which put service levels and system availability at risk. In addition, Shinhan Bank wanted to implement high-availability solutions, but the current IT environment was incapable of supporting them. Adding further complexity, the bank needed to integrate Choheung Bank operations into its overall IT infrastructure, which could not accommodate the added scale. Finally, Shinhan Bank sought greater end-to-end visibility and control into its distributed environment.

The Solution
In order to address these challenges, Shinhan Bank made the decision to migrate from an outdated mainframe environment to a UNIX-based open system platform. The bank also elected to standardize its data center software infrastructure on Symantec Data Center Foundation software, which included Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, and Symantec i3. The transformation that began in 2002 was accomplished with assistance from Symantec Partner 3S Soft Co., Ltd. Two local Korean systems integrators also assisted with the implementation.

Benefits
A Total Operations and Economic Impact (TOEI™) Study by The Alchemy Solutions Group pinpointed various areas of business value resulting from the data center standardization initiative, including enhanced labor utilization, significant savings from the avoidance of increased labor expense, and more efficient data storage. First, the avoidance of labor cost directly related to improved data storage and backup procedures is projected to save more than nearly US$2 million. Second, better volume management and data storage recapture will result in more than US$3.6 million in savings. Third, productivity improvements in cluster server configuration and storage virtualization will generate roughly $10 million in savings. Fourth, streamlined application issue resolution, deployments, and upgrades will yield more that $800,000 in savings. Finally, with the help of Symantec Business Critical Services, the bank is able to redeploy resources to core operations, as well as provide faster resolution to data management issues.

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