EastWest Bank chooses HP to build Private Cloud

EastWest Bank, one of the fastest growing banks in the Philippines, has selected HP Converged Infrastructure to provide a modern, flexible and agile foundation to keep pace with business demands and transition to private cloud.

Established in 1994, EastWest Bank has successfully competed with large multinational banks to become one of the largest credit card issuers and providers of auto loans in the Philippines. Technology upgrades to support new client services, including a new automation program, have been instrumental to the bank’s success. However, the company realized that its legacy IT infrastructure hindered productivity. This included an end-of-day financial system closing process that required a minimum of six hours to complete.

After evaluating solutions from IBM and EMC, EastWest Bank selected HP Converged Infrastructure to streamline IT operations, reduce costs and scale its IT infrastructure in response to increasing customer transactions.

The upgraded infrastructure includes the HP 3PAR StoreServ T400 Storage System, for scalable, flexible and cost-efficient storage. EastWest Bank also deployed HP ProLiant DL360 Servers to optimize performance per watt and square foot, while maximizing power efficiency with shared power supplies.

“Our previous system didn’t give us enough flexibility to meet our daily business needs; the infrastructure was limiting because we were unable to allocate storage between systems,” said Randy Evangelista, vice president and head, Information Technology Group, EastWest Bank. “By implementing HP Converged Infrastructure, we’ve taken an important step towards building a private cloud and delivering a dynamic and flexible IT environment that can keep pace with our business demands.”

To ensure business continuity, EastWest Bank deployed one HP 3PAR StoreServ T400 Storage System at its production data center and another at its disaster recovery site. The ability to consolidate thousands of virtual machines onto a single storage system enables the company to easily handle the increase in workload and support further growth.

Implementing HP 3PAR StoreServ has enabled EastWest Bank to achieve its primary objective of reducing end-of-day processing time by 40 percent. Data recovery time for all mission-critical systems was also reduced from up to four hours to only one hour. This includes core banking and other principal financial applications. Additionally, sharing and maximizing storage capacity enables EastWest Bank to eliminate the need to purchase additional hardware. The updated infrastructure offers 80 TB of total storage capacity, approximately five years of data, to meet important financial industry data storage requirements.

Throughout EastWest Bank’s transition to HP Converged Infrastructure, HP Technology Services provided consulting and support expertise for infrastructure design, implementation and migration. Working hand in hand with EastWest Bank, HP’s technical experts ensured the correct design to meet EastWest Bank’s specific infrastructure needs.