Over the past three years the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) has grown at a rate of 25% year on year.

Last year NBAD sought out revamping its public image – designing a new head office and last October the bank expanded its footprint in South America, where it opened its first branch in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

This bought NBAD’s total number of branches and offices to 185 - 125 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and 60 across five continents. Last year the bank announced plans to be operating in a further 35 markets by 2020.

With a continuing high rate of expansion NBAD’s head of IT infrastructure Hossam Elkobrosy said the banks existing IT architecture couldn’t support its applications and services.

“We audited the CPU usage and discovered the utilization across 600 servers was less than 10% so we clearly needed to optimize our data center. Moving to a virtualized server environment seemed like the best approach.”

NBAD contacted a number of analysts to explore the best way to migrate from a physical server environment to a virtualized platform.

The bank invited vendors to tender for the project with key criteria including performance, memory and cost. NBAD highlighted its need to have just one managed solution - tying in software, hardware, storage and the network.

NBAD worked with Japanese company Fujitsu to deploy PRIMERGY servers hosting 800 virtualized servers on VMware.

The bank has 34 Fujitsu BX900 and BX924 servers in production and a further 28 in disaster recovery.

According to Elkobrosy most banks only virtualize 50% of their servers as some applications and services do not ‘lend themselves’ to virtualization.

“We have managed to migrate 80% to a virtual environment, reducing the overall complexity while increasing availability,” Elkobrosy said.

Since migrating from its physical server environment to an 80% virtualized platform NBAD has witnessed several benefits.

- The temperature in its data center has been reduced by 5°C which Elkobrosy said makes cooling the facility less of an issue.

- Overall power load in the data center has been reduced by 25%, which the bank said has saved it money and has lowered its impact on the environment.

- NBAD’s data center has gained 20% more space since deploying the PRIMERGY servers, which Elkobrosy said will help the banks future expansion plans.

- Elkobrosy said before virtualizing its system utilization was less than 10%. Since deploying the new virtualized environment it has increased nearly three-fold from 6 to 45%.

- Thanks to patch management, quicker application deployment and the ability to near instantly return to a restore point, Elkobrosy said the banks performance has been improved and its downtime reduced to a minimum each year.

An additional benefit for NBAD according to Elkobrosy is a quicker time to market for new applications. Before deploying the new servers it took NBAD more than six weeks to deploy new services, which Elkobrosy said, has been reduced significantly to a single day.

Elkobrosy said due to the nature of the financial industry running a more efficient service enables the bank to react quickly to market changes and demands.

“Power, space and cooling were the original drivers behind the project so we are delighted to have had such an instant and positive impact on those areas but the project has delivered so much more,” Elkobrosy said.

“Performance is vastly improved and uptime has also increased, giving a better user experience. Previously, it would take 20 minutes to reboot a Windows server, with VMware on Fujitsu blades, it takes one minute. That makes solving issues much quicker and less frustrating.”

With the new data center up and running and delivering significant benefits across the business, NBAD said it is looking to the future and where else it can make savings while increasing its overall effectiveness.

According to Elkobrosy some of the areas to be discussed for improvement include automation, chargeback, self-provisioning and virtualizing the network and storage environments.