Mediterranean Bank in Malta Opts for StorMagic Virtual SAN

StorMagic, Inc. announced that Mediterranean Bank has deployed its SvSAN to lower their costs of computing while improving resiliency and performance of critical applications.

The bank was founded in 2004 in Malta, and as well as providing banking and financial services to the local population. It offers online savings, investment and wealth management under the MeDirect brand in Belgium. The company employs more than 250 people, with locations across Malta, as well as remote sites in London, UK, and Brussels, Belgium.

Installing SvSAN delivered benefits to the bank. Their requirement for physical storage was eliminated along with the additional expenditure on cooling, power consumption and maintenance. By reducing their reliance on physical hardware and moving to virtual SANs, the bank modernized their architecture and enjoyed improved resiliency. They avoided the purchase and installation of physical SANs which would have been more expensive and more complex than virtualization, particularly at the remote sites in Belgium and the UK.

The bank already had physical shared storage using six-year old servers and they were approaching end of life. The infrastructure performed a variety of roles depending on the location, vital security components such as the operation of the main office’s front gate and the handling of sensitive data such as new customer applications.

The London and Belgian sites had critical business VMs running on multiple old servers with local storage and wanted to consolidate, while at the same time improving performance and resiliency. In Malta, the business intelligence team had a requirement to implement a new solution, consisting of web, apps, and network storage for the Qlickview operations that had to be available even in DR scenarios. For all three sites, a lightweight and flexible solution was needed to provide the HA vital to the bank’s operations.

Through research of the options available, Julian Vella, Mediterranean Bank’s senior engineer, IT systems, came across SvSAN. Their need for a low cost solution that minimized hardware footprint made SvSAN a fit and ruled out a number of other virtualized options where additional hardware would have been required. Vella ruled out a physical SAN for the London and Brussels remote sites because of the geographical distance and the need to minimize footprint and maintenance. SvSAN was selected because it met requirements: HA, small footprint and low cost.

Because SvSAN is software-defined and enables HA between two servers, the uptime requirement was met, and operational costs were lowered. In Malta, the bank has implemented a stretch cluster using SvSAN, allowing synchronous mirroring between two physical sites, providing additional resiliency and protection from local site outages. With this solution, all VMs in the cluster are synchronized, and the bank has the ability to move the VMs between sites without disruption.

“StorMagic SvSAN helps our branches achieve the availability required to operate in the extremely secure, fast-paced world of banking. Their virtual SAN software is exactly what we needed to deliver the uptime and simplicity of management – while keeping to a very tight budget,” said Vella.