Van Lanschot Bank Buys Four Brocade 48000 Directors

Brocade announced that F. van Lanschot Bankiers N.V, the oldest independent bank in The Netherlands, has deployed four Brocade 48000 Directors as part of an organisation-wide data management strategy that aims to simplify storage management and accommodate the bank’s growing storage demands, driven by next generation services such as Internet banking.

As the oldest independent bank in The Netherlands (founded 270 years ago), Van Lanschot’s sense of duty to its customers is beyond doubt. Today, its services mainly focus on high net-worth individuals and entrepreneurs. The key driver behind Van Lanschot’s engagement with Brocade was to enable the highest quality data storage. As part of an overall architecture which encompassed EMC Symmetrix DMX-4s, EMC Disk Libraries and EMC Celerra gateways, Access Gateways in its bladed server environments, the bank’s selection of Brocade’s 48000 Directors for the heart of its data centre helps consolidate its existing storage footprint (from 24 switches to four Brocade 48000 Directors) and in turn simplifies overall SAN management.

The Brocade 48000 Director is proven technology that will not only serve Van Lanschot’s immediate needs, but also those of the future, Van Lanschot is confident that it will be able to reap the benefits in a short timeframe.

"Exploiting the corporate information assets is essential in any industry, but is particularly important in the financial services sector", commented Claus Egge, Program Director at IDC’s Storage Group. "By leveraging the potential of next-generation storage solutions [virtualisation, consolidation, data protection], banks are able to simplify storage management which in turn enables smarter provisioning of information to their internal and external customers."

In just three months, Van Lanschot was able to fully migrate the Brocade 48000 Directors into its existing storage architecture with no problems. In the future, the bank aims to expand its data management strategy with VMWare functionality and in-flight migration techniques that will equip it to meet the needs of its evolving customer base.

The Brocade 48000 Director is the industry’s leading director-class platform for enterprise SANs, delivering powerful 8Gb and 4Gb connectivity, advanced hardware and software capabilities, and ‘five-nines’ reliability. The Brocade 48000’s modular design and high port density provides a flexible and scalable solution for large open systems and System z environments in round-the-clock data centres. Organisations can utilise it as a standalone director, at the core of a multi-switch SAN, or at the edge of a Brocade Data Centre Fabric (DCF) architecture.