Fixin' it

BRI hired Silverlake, whose core banking software is used in about 100 banks in Southeast Asia, not only to provide software but also suggest how BRI might go about implementing its data warehouse. Half a dozen Silverlake data warehouse experts worked onsite at BRI to confirm business requirements and processes with users, develop software, test it and get it up and running. Earlier in the year, BRI had hired Accenture to draw up a blueprint for management reporting within the bank, and the new data warehouse system had to conform to this plan. Consultants from Microsoft took care of designing the data warehousing cube.

Over the next few months, consultants worked to extract data from the old system, clean it and move it to a HPHP clustered 8-processor server running on Microsoft Windows Server 2000 32-bit operating system and SQL 7 database. The backend is a 33-TB EMC Symmetrix enterprise storage system. Alles zu HP auf CIO.de

Recently, BRI also hired Microsoft Services to improve the performance of the warehousing component of its solution, as it had begun to fall short of their standards. Explains Irwan Tirtariyadi, director, Microsoft Indonesia: "Their pain point was that users--business managers accessing the data warehouse for ad hoc reports--had to wait about one to 10 minutes to access certain reports. That was really slowing productivity down." After understanding the pain points raised by BRI, Microsoft, which recently launched its 64-bit Windows 2003 server, made the recommendation that the 64-bit environment be used for the data warehousing engine, which was subsequently ported to Windows 2003 64-bit and SQL 64-bit. "The previous 32-bit Microsoft platform was sufficient when BRI first implemented its data warehousing system, but the company had been growing very fast--their latest data store stood at 2 terabytes--and is growing in the order of 300-400 gigabytes a month," says Tirtariyadi. "And with this increasing data size and complexity of environment, they needed to move to 64-bit."

The benefits of the 64-bit environment have emerged even during the testing and development phase. "We have seen a 50 percent improvement in transaction time for end-of-month processing and SQL queries," says Malligan. In the 32-bit environment, business managers had to wait one or two minutes to access certain reports; that has come down to seconds. Before, it took eight hours to consolidate monthly reports; with 64-bit, it takes three hours.

Because 64-bit is still new technology, challenges were faced in porting the data warehousing cube from the 32- to 64-bit environment. Tirtariyadi: "Multi-vendor coordination was critical as a number of hardware vendors were involved: Intel and HP--because BRI's latest hardware is based on Itanium 2--and EMC--because BRI recently employed their storage area network."