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
