Germany's Commerzbank has signed a multi-million dollar contract with IBM for the supply of storage servers and software which it will use to consolidate and streamline its existing data archiving and disaster recovery infrastructure.
The bank will replace more than 100 EMC and HP storage devices with 13 IBM TotalStorage DS8000 systems connected by Brocade Directors. Commerzbank will also build up a storage virtualisation system based on the vendor's TotalStorage Productivity Center technology.
Peter Kraemer, Global Head of IT Production at Commerzbank. "As a result of the consolidation of our systems, we can enhance the agility in our customer channel and services offerings as well as improve the storage and access time to data."
The storage infrastructure will be used to back up the bank's commercial banking, investment and administrative data.
All back up data will be stored in a separate data centre using IBM's Remote Copy Management Facility which creates point-in-time copies of data at defined intervals.
Commerzbank will start rolling out the new storage systems at the end of March with full implementation scheduled for the fourth quarter.