Bank uninterrupted

PNB's business continuity plan springs from a deep desire to provide uninterrupted service to customers By Aditya Kelekar

Punjab National Bank (PNB), which started operations in 1895 with the distinction of being the first Indian bank to have been started with Indian capital, is among the largest public sector banks in India. It has over 38 million customers and 4,668 offices. With assets worth more than Rs 2,46,900 crore, PNB is ranked as the 3rd largest bank in the country (after SBI and ICICI Bank) and has the 2nd largest network of branches. During the FY 2008-09, with 39% share of low cost deposits, the bank achieved a net profit of Rs 3,091 crore.

In recent years, PNB has laid much emphasis on disaster recovery planning. All of PNB's branches are on the CBS (Core Banking Solution) with all the banking applications centralized. The centralized applications are hosted at the bank's self-managed data center. "As per the business continuity plan, a Disaster Recovery site with 100% compute power has been established at an alternate city," said Ajay Misra, General Manager (IT) at PNB. "Both are well secured with ISO 27001 certifications, he noted.

Misra said that their Business Continuity Plan (BCP) had provisions to help banks branches to provide uninterrupted customer service even during the Disaster Recovery switch over as also in times of network disruption-the objective being that of offering continuous service to the clients even during the operation testing periods.

Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) has a Recovery Time Objective (RPO) of two hours and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of Zero. There is continuous data replication between data center and disaster recovery site. The storage based replication and Oracle Data guard ensured that the time lag of synchronization does not go beyond 20 minutes. "The DRP is tested with paper walk through and full load DR Switch over once in a quarter. At that time, the bank's operations are handled from the DR site," Misra said.

At the branch level, the account wise balance data file is automatically transferred to a particular PC identified for that purpose at least three times a day. The branches offer customer service based on the balance file even during the network (or) server outage. “Branch level BCP is an effective tool for uninterrupted customer service,” Misra added.

As the critical banking operations are supported from the datacenter, sufficient redundancy has been built at every stage and this has helped the bank to offer 100% service uptime, claimed Misra and added “Server uptime of 100% has been achieved consistently for the last three quarters and an overall network uptime of 99.75% has been achieved.”

PNB has also put in place software to increase operational efficiencies—OmniFlow and other related software has been used to centralize account opening and FEX operations.

The banks has also embarked on storage virtualization for optimizing the process of backing up data. With that, the cost of investment in the storage devices has been reduced.

The bank uses Oracle EM (Enterprise Manager) package for oracle performance monitoring, maintaining the data base and tuning and optimizing the performance of the enterprise database. "The periodical health check-up has increased our operational efficiencies," said Misra.

Using datacenter management tools such as CA's

Unicentre has helped the bank to optimize its investments and increase its efficiency, Misra felt. The network maintenance tool has reduced the network downtime and the server and database maintenance tool has enabled the server and data base management teams to proactively observe the system, and take corrective steps.

aditya.kelekar@expressindia.com