Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets

Client: Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets
Industry: Financial Services
Solution: Two DD430 Appliances, One DD460 Appliance

Company

Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets is division of the Lloyds TSB Group, a leading UK-based financial services group with assets of over £300 billion and approximately 70,000 employees.

The Corporate Markets Division offers award-winning relationship banking and has expertise in providing comprehensive financial solutions across a broad range of asset classes, including risk management, cash management, trade, structured investments, specialist financing and HR/pension services. In addition to supporting a constantly expanding suite of financial products, the division’s IT team is responsible for addressing the information technology requirements associated with an active trading floor operation consisting of over 200 trading positions.

Customer Challenges

With the opening of its new Ten Gresham Street headquarters location, the Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets IT team faced a number of challenges that went well beyond the relocation of their operations — compliance regulations in the financial industry were on the rise and the internal realignment coincided with a rapid expansion of the division’s product capabilities. Their existing backup process was tape-based — approximated 120 locally attached DLT drives that, over time, had evolved to include a variety of software and machine types. In the last year alone, their backup data capacity requirements had more than tripled as the division had embarked on a highly successful growth strategy. Given the mission-critical nature of their trading operations, the tapes were being brought offsite daily to their contingency site. The opportunity to upgrade their data protection system and realize accelerated ROI (Return On Investment) was clear to the Corporate Markets IT team. A long time partner and trusted system integrator, S3, introduced them to Data Domain’s Enterprise Protection Storage systems for disk backup and network-based disaster recovery.

“ROI was not the main focus for us, manageability was. However, with 120 disparate backups going on and tapes being compiled and brought offsite on a daily, the opportunity for ROI was obviously quite huge,” says Colin Everett, Head of IT Strategy and Architecture at Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets. “We made a policy decision quite early on that we didn’t want tape for backup. We needed a level of scalability that mapped to our division’s aggressive growth plans and the locally attached tape drives simply required too much administration effort. As the division grew, the whole process became more cumbersome.”

Data Domain Solution

Following a thirty day pilot test of the proposed Data Domain solution, Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets implemented two Data Domain DD430 restorers at the new Gresham Street building in London and one DD460 restorer at their remote contingency site. Data Domain DD Replicator software was used in conjunction with the firm’s existing 1Gb/s link to replicate backup data to the contingency site where final tape consolidation takes place.

The initial amount of backup data was approximately 4 terabytes, but as Everett notes, “That will ramp rapidly. The key objective is to be able to get our front office up and running as soon as possible in the event of a disruption in London. At this point, practically speaking, we’re replicating in real time. Within minutes of backup completion in London, data is replicated and available at our contingency site located outside the City. We’ve achieved that using an existing non-dedicated 1Gb/s link, which speaks well for the performance of the deduplication-enabled Data Domain appliances and the network efficiencies realized with the DD Replicator software.”

Business Benefits

Today, Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets enjoys the performance and reliability of disk-based backup and network-based disaster recovery systems. Thirty days of data are now retained locally, and high speed restores are readily available both locally and from the contingency site. The risks associated with tape handling and tape media failures, and the time and money spent on administrating their tape-based backup processes have been eliminated. Expenditures on tape media for local backup have been also been eradicated, as have outside costs for tape transportation to the remote contingency site.

“The overnight process of changing the tapes, dealing with backup failures and retrieving tapes to do our compliance testing took an incredible amount of time and effort. Now we can turn our attention to more strategic items, give better support to our internal clients and focus on helping to manage the firm’s growth,” says Everett. “With the inherent scalability and high performance of our backup systems, we can now respond to new product deployments more effectively — without having to worry whether our backup capabilities will slow us down.”

Everett notes that data compression and network-based replication capabilities were what first led his team to consider Data Domain. The thirty day pilot of the actual solution made the decision clear. At one point, they had considered using VTL products and replicating to another VTL over an extended SAN. But over and above the high cost, the resulting solution would have been difficult to support and scale.

“The Data Domain solution was very cost effective, but cost was not the primary consideration for us,” says Everett. “With the opening of our new flagship building and new state-of-the-art trading floor, we wanted cutting edge technology for our backup and contingency operations that we could both trust and be proud of. We chose Data Domain.”

“With the opening of our new flagship building and new state-of-the-art trading floor, we wanted cutting edge technology for our backup and contingency operations that we could both trust and be proud of. We chose Data Domain.”

Colin Everett
Head of IT Strategy and Architecture
Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets