Vibha agrawal feels poor IT capacity planning hampers growth resulting in poor customer service

HDFC, the banking and housing finance company, earlier used to manage its entire IT infrastructure manually. It has benefited from Computer Associates’ Unicenter network management solution. Akhtar Pasha finds that the bank has been able to reduce its hardware and maintenance costs, lower downtime and increase productivity through this implementation

HDFC Bank was formed in 1995 by HDFC, India’s premier housing finance company. In recent years the bank has grown rapidly and its IT infrastructure has kept pace spanning 61 cities in 160 locations with 400 ATMs. Managing this gargantuan network requires investments to the tune of crores of rupees. 200 servers and 3,500 desktops running Unix, Windows NT and Novell NetWare make for a challenging environment. HDFC Bank tried to keep things under control with a home-grown network management solution where most of the monitoring and repairs were done manually.

In such a situation, a switch to an automated NMS (Network Management Software) system that facilitates network management from a central location, became a necessity. “We wanted an efficient tool that could manage our entire IT infrastructure from a central location. Before this deployment we did everything manually. This was not only time consuming but also expensive, resulting in very low productivity,” says C N Ram, IT director, HDFC Bank.

Why CA?
HDFC Bank evaluated several network management solutions including CA Unicenter, IBM Tivoli and HP Openview. Computer Associates’ (CA) Unicenter TNG was found to suit the bank’s requirements. Ram explains, “Our main objective was to keep pace with growth plans and deliver quality IT service. On this basis, the IT team evaluated the available options and found that CA’s Unicenter TNG fulfilled all our requirements. CA’s Unicenter was the most cost-effective and it had a higher system capacity. With it we were able to improve capacity planning, IT infrastructure management and security, and also maintain our assets centrally. CA has a wide installed base for Unicenter in India, which was also a crucial factor in deciding upon this solution.”

Vibha Agrawal, national manager-Enterprise Management, CA India, adds, “We command a 90 percent share in the Indian enterprise network management solution market. We have over 100 Unicenter installations in India with customers such as ICICI Bank, NSE, BSE, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, Maruti, GAIL and VSNL. This was one of the reasons why HDFC chose us.”

Says Ram, “The key issue for the bank was managing its growth—very important for a company that is traversing a steep growth curve. Capacity planning in such a scenario assumes great importance since poor capacity planning in its IT set-up might hamper growth resulting in poor customer service.”

Diverse legacy systems
“HDFC,” says Agrawal, “has diverse IT infrastructure running on geographically heterogeneous environments. We had three operating systems in use—Unix, NT and Novell. Oracle and SQL were used as databases and the hardware was a mix from Intel and Sun Microsystems consisting of 200 servers, 3,500 desktops and a Superdome 6500. All this is supported by leased lines backed by VSATs or ISDN lines. Before the implementation, all the systems were manually managed by the bank.”

If the bank continued with manual processing, the error margins would have been higher. Agrawal explains that at the architectural level, the bank had to redefine policies of the server management module. For instance, if the CPU usage exceeds 70 percent, then the system administrator should be alerted either by e-mail or fax to take appropriate action. Or the system should send an escalation message whenever an error is reported.” The bank wanted a tool that could give past records and current network analysis so it could plan for the future—upgrade the links and servers, and add more disk capacities and memory where required. Unicenter TNG ensured that a disk overload set off an alarm for taking preventive measures.

Another challenge was that HDFC’s legacy system needed a lot of human intervention to run scripts on a daily basis. Everyday, after all transactions were completed, HDFC used to shut down the system to read and evaluate the script and restart them the next day. In this process, if they forgot to start even one or two scripts out of the 250 written for the various systems, the system would fail. Now, Unicenter TNG interacts automatically with HDFC’s whole range of hardware and databases.

Implementation
Today, the HDFC network operates on a hub and spoke arrangement. About 170 sites are currently connected to the central server in Mumbai. Local branches connect to regional hubs, which in turn are linked to the central server. A 64 Kbps network, with 2 Mbps leased lines, radio modems and VSATs with a two vendor ISDN back up, ensures that downtime remains at a negligible 0.5 percent.

Instead of implementing the complete solution, HDFC Bank chose some specific and relevant modules of the Unicenter TNG suite to start off in 1999. In the first phase the bank choose to implement the desktop module, server management module, network management module, desk top management including software delivery, remote control, advanced help desk, asset management and database management. And in the second phase it decided to implement server management that includes OS management and performance management, Web server management and ATM management.

CA took the global strategy route to implement Unicenter solution, starting from defining a state of work also called ‘SOW’. This includes defining the scope of infrastructure and setting up test pilots. It took two to three weeks to complete the test pilot at HDFC. After six months, CA finally rolled out Unicenter with the help of its implementation partner Wipro Infotech.

About 15 people from Wipro Infotech, five from HDFC bank and two from CA were involved in the project. They are also responsible for providing technical support and post-implementation support.

CA’s Unicenter TNG can trap the traffic flowing on the bank’s network. E-mail sent using the bank’s Internet ID are monitored through the suite. Thus the tool helps measure the number of messages that go out of the bank from both authorised and non-authorised sources. This is one of the reasons why the bank has drawn up a policy on authorisation and access. It takes action against those who misuse bandwidth and try to gain unauthorised access.

The desktop policy helps capture details on asset management, which in turn helps HDFC Bank ascertain and quantify its hardware and software. Industry estimates put the cost of deploying a Unicenter solution across a diverse IT infrastructure like HDFC’s to be upward of Rs 5 crore.

Benefits
Says Ram, “Unicenter Remote Control option (RCO) in conjunction with the Software Delivery Option (SDO) has worked wonders for us, as it has helped the engineers manage software more effectively than in the past. Earlier our network engineers were spending too much time travelling to solve users’ problems. Rather than manually installing, managing and de-installing software applications, software upgrades and maintenance are performed from a central location without visiting the individual user’s desktop. This translates into big savings for the bank.”

HDFC is now able to predict potential problems and bottlenecks because it has a built-in predictive management capability. The bank is now able to initiate backup links if required and has been able to achieve a reachability of 99 percent.

The website management solution is helping HDFC’s customers access its site for online services. In the case of banking, customer’s convenience is defined as 100 percent availability, faster response time and enhanced transaction experience during every single interaction. The usage of Net for banking has risen by 30 percent in the last six months. “We are currently doing about three lakh transactions a month over the Net. The number of transactions on our ATMs has been increasing rapidly. From 1.9 million per month in June 2001 it had gone up to about 3 million by Jan 2002,” says Ram.

“It is difficult to quantify the savings, but our findings indicate that HDFC was able to reduce the investment in hardware by 10 percent, says Agrawal. By utilising Unicenter service desk and Unicenter remote control for the proactive and remote resolution of technical issues, HDFC has reduced administrative costs and system downtime, leaving more time for IT staff to focus on strategic and business-critical issues.