ICICI Bank is the second-largest bank in terms of assets and largest private sector bank in India, offering a wide range of banking and financial services products to more than 20 million retail and corporate customers.
ICICI Bank seeks to be at the forefront of technology usage in the financial services sector. Information technology is a strategic tool for business operations, providing the bank with a competitive advantage and improved productivity and efficiencies. All the bank's IT initiatives are aimed at enhancing value, offering customer convenience, and improving service levels.
The bank is achieving 99.9 percent application availability and 99.99 percent uptime for its server infrastructure. The bank relies on Symantec NetBackup and a full range of agents and options for data protection. The solution is delivering tangible results, including a 50 percent reduction in the time to rebuild corrupted servers and 25 percent annual growth in data volume without any increase in staffing resources.
ICICI Bank is the first bank in India to offer internet banking services. In 1999 bank consolidate its IT operations in its new data center in Mumbai. To ensure high availability and comply with banking regulatory authority requirement for disaster recovery and backup, bank has chosen Symantec Netbackup as backup solution.
Symantec Netbackup is an enterprise level backup and recovery software suit. It provides cross-platform backup functionality to a large verity of operating systems. Symantec NetBackup provides unified, high-performance data protection that scales to protect the largest UNIX, Windows, Linux, databases environments. With complete protection from desktop to datacenter to vault, NetBackup offers a single console for all backup and recovery operations.
To meet its datacenter availability goals, ICICI Bank runs its backup and disaster recovery application on Solaris 10 operating system and using hardware like SUN M9000, SUN T2000, IBM TS7500 VTL, IBM TS3500 Tape library, and Decru encryption appliance.
On Netbackup application side Bank uses different agent and option for backup and recovery options like Bare Metal Restore, De-duplication, Shared Storage Option, Netbackup Vault, Flash Backup, Synthetic backup, storage life cycle policies, RMAN agent, MSSQL agent and granule recovery options. These backup agents take advantage of the unique features and structure of each database to minimize disruptions to the applications that use each database while ensuring complete protection of the information.
Fig.: 1 Backup infrastructure layout
As data volumes grow at a rapid rate for ICICI Bank-currently 500 gigabytes a month-the bank is challenged to backup increased data volumes without extending its backup window. With round-the-clock operations, bank only have a few hours during the night to complete backups without affecting production systems. Below I am giving details about hardware and backup software agent how they help to reduce backup window and help in disaster recovery and regulatory compliance.
Bank has two data center one is production data center site and other is disaster recovery site. Production site and disaster recovery site connected with lease line with 300 Mbps of speed in 1:1 Ratio.
Bank production site have more then 1000 servers and data size of more the 50 Terabytes for data protection and backup windows is limited to 12 hours, here Symantec Netbackup agents and options help to take backup faster and within time frame.
What is Backup?
Backup process refers to making copies of data so that these copies may be used
at time of data loss or data corruption. Backup have two primary purposes, the first purpose is to recover data in the case of data loss. The secondary purpose of backup is to recover historical data as required by regulatory or customer. Backup represent a simple form of disaster recovery and should be part of a disasters recovery plan.
Types of backup
Full backup
A full backup backs up all of the files that are specified in the backup selections list. The files are backed up, regardless of when the files were created, last modified or backed up.
Cumulative incremental backup
A cumulative incremental backup backs up the files that are specified in the backup selections list that have changed since the last full backup. All files are backed up if no previous backup has been done.
Differential incremental backup
A differential incremental backup backs up the files that have changed since the last successful incremental (differential or cumulative) or full backup. All files are backed up if no previous backup has been done.
Type of backup media
Magnetic tape media has been used for taking backup. A tape is sequential read and writes media, having poor access time but reading writing data is very fast. Linear Tape-Open or LTO is a open standard technology for magnetic tape formats. There are different versions of LTO magnetic tape like LTO1, LTO2, LTO3, LTO4 and latest one LTO5. Now a days commonly used media are LTO4 and LTO5, LTO4 is having a capacity of 800GB and LTO5 is having a capacity of 1.5TB.
What is VTL?
VTL is physically highly optimized disk based storage, which is logically a physical tape library. VTL logically appear and operate as physical tape library devices like robot, tape slots, media and tap drive.
Decru
Decru is encryption appliance that do inline data encryption without affecting workflow.
Symantec Netbackup Architecture
Symantec Netbackup work on three-tier architecture. Netbackup three-tier architecture consists of Master server, Media server and client.
Master server is the "brains" for all data protection activities, from scheduling and tracking client backups to managing tape media and storage units.
Media server is responsible for client backup and recovery and managing local attached tape drives.
Any server requires data protection is Netbackup client.
Netbackup agent and options
Flash Backup Option
Taking a big database backup is faster then taking a file server backup because when system write a file on hard drive it does not do a sequential write on hard drive, it will write data on first available empty data block and these data block are on different location on hard drive reading these data blocks take time. Here Flash backup option help to take file server's backup faster then traditional backups. Flash backup is like a raw partition backup where it do the data backup at block level. We can also take block level differential backup using Flash Backups. When you have a large number (millions) of small files, Flash backup will back up these files much faster since it's doing a block level backup rather than trying to pick up each file from the file system.
Shared storage option
The Shared Storage Option allows multiple NetBackup media servers to share individual tape drive. NetBackup automatically allocates and unallocated the drives as backup and restore operations require. This option gives more flexibility to backup infrastructure, when drive needed on media server is allocated and unallocated after job completion.
