Bajaj Capital ups employee efficiency by improving processing speed with Dell’s storage solution
By Heena Jhingan
With almost 50 years of experience in providing financial services to individual and corporate investors in India, Bajaj Capital is a known name in investment banking services. Based in New Delhi, the company operates over 100 investment centers across the country.
A couple of years back, when the company invested in a storage solution, it ensured that they planned for at least two years ahead. However, the company’s IT team did not anticipate that the data growth will surpass their expectation in less than half the predicted time.
Puneet Kaur Kohli, CIO, Bajaj Capital, reasons that this pace of data growth is not surprising, as unlike other sectors such as telecom, there is no time frame or limit to storing data. The financial data might be needed any time. “We being in a highly regulated industry, need to keep up with new guidelines and make changes to management and storage of data. These factors can make our storage requirements unpredictable.”
She explains that during month-end closing, the company faced spikes in workload, which caused bottlenecks in application performance. Besides, the company also started experiencing threshold issues with the existing EMC solution that they had deployed. In a scenario where real time data fetching is a must, several concurrent sessions could not be supported. All these factors combined, led to delays in closing the monthly accounting period.
Bajaj Capital was battling with not just escalating performance issues, but also the inflating cost of storage due to their reliance on expensive disks for inactive and infrequently accessed data. Kohli says they needed a storage solution which could scale over the long term, and have the robustness to perform even during peak workload sessions.
For this, she pointed out, the company needed to first understand their storage structure. At Bajaj Capital, the data could vary from company files such as digitised copies of documents, voice logs of customer conversations to image files, stored for extended periods of time. Since most of this data would not be required quite often, the company needed a storage solution that could seamlessly move this static data to less costly storage disks as and when required.
Tier by tier
The company could either look at upgrading the existing EMC solution or buy a new solution. Kohli explains they evaluated EMC, Hitachi and Dell. However, after an apple to apple comparison, they concluded that Dell scored much higher on support and service. Price was equally appealing.
“Our initial calculations indicated that the average cost per user be much lower on Dell as compared to others. And after the deployment back in October last year, I feel we will be able to cash in RoI in less than two years,” Kohli stresses.
So, post a detailed comparison, the firm selected Dell to configure and deploy a Dell Compellent SC8000 Storage Center array. “Bajaj Capital is using Dell Compellent Data Progression to move active data to Tier 1 storage. Migration of less active data to more cost-effective lower level Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage happens automatically,” says Suraj Sabberwal, General Manager, Global 500, Dell India.
Kohli believes, what sets Dell apart is their fluid architecture. She says Dell’s tiered architecture was an ideal solution for Bajaj Capital’s needs as it could classify data according to usage. “We have a lot of data that requires medium levels of performance and can reside on SAS disks, while our most active data requires high-performing solid state disks to ensure it remains immediately accessible to our users,” she adds.
Now with active data residing on solid-state drives (SSD), the company has been able to decrease the monthly accounting time period. Kohli informs, “The Dell solution is delivering three times the number of IOPS (input/output operations per second) compared to our previous solution and we are now able to close our monthly accounting period on time. This in turn has improved the overall efficiency of the organisation.”
Efficiency and simplicity
With faster processing speed and greater employee efficiency, Kohli feels the company is now equipped to better focus on expanding its portfolio of financial products. “Maintaining high levels of customer service has become easier through quick access to data. For example, employees can now generate an investment holding statement or portfolio for a customer in less than 15 seconds, compared to up to one minute in the previous system,” she elucidates.
Kohli says, “The employees are benefiting from the speed with which they can access data needed for approvals and workflow activities and this makes us highly responsive to our customers.” Time of service is very critical for financial services institutions and delays can mean loss of business. So, before Bajaj Capital decided to implement Dell solution, they conducted several instances of planned downtime to gauge the the prospective challenges during the actual implementation.
With the solution in place, Kohli says they find things going smoothly and the concurrent user size for each application has also significantly improved. Impressed by untiring support provided by Dell, Bajaj Capital is now keen on extending their association with the company to the next level. Kohli observes Dell as a company has evolved in a big way. “Dell has ventured into new IT avenues to line up a richer product portfolio. It has strengthened its software stand and made inroads into diversified fields. We would like to explore their other services like consulting and security management as well,” she concludes.
