Challenge:

1. Success Story
ING DIRECT Innovates
Faster with NetApp, Cisco,
and Microsoft Private Cloud
Another NetApp
solution delivered with:
Customer Profile “We’re a very innovative bank,” says
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
ING DIRECT is the world’s leading direct Ben Issa, head of IT Strategy, ING
Industry savings bank and is wholly owned by DIRECT Australia. “People were coming
Financial services the global ING Group. Launched in to our team asking us to test the impact
1999, it pioneered branchless banking of their ideas on our complex banking
The Challenge in Australia, reinventing the way Austra- environment. We could only test so
Speed up delivery with rapid lians bank. It went on to revolutionize the many projects at once, so we had long
provisioning of copies of the mortgage market with straightforward lead times. As a strategic priority, we
bank environment. home loans, growing to become the needed to deliver innovation faster.”
Improve developer productivity. country’s fifth-largest mortgage lender. It
Accelerate time to market for Because provisioning of a single copy
now has more than 1.5 million custom-
new products and services. of the bank for testing took eight peo-
ers with US$27 billion in deposits and
ple three months, ING DIRECT wanted
The Solution US$39 billion in mortgages. The bank’s
to fully automate end-to-end provision-
A new, fully integrated testing award-winning team of 950 people is
ing, making staff more productive and
and development architecture, proud to continue this history of innova-
focusing on the things that matter.
including hardware, software, tion, with an in-house IT team of 150
“Our team is lean and efficient and
and professional services employees managing all of the bank’s
very engaged, but our delivery model
software and application development.
severely limited how many concurrent
Benefits
The Challenge projects and changes we could man-
Reduced provisioning time
Creating a more agile testing and age,” says Andrew Henderson, CIO,
from 12 weeks to 10 minutes
development architecture ING DIRECT Australia. “We asked our-
Improved developer productiv-
With a large project backlog, the devel- selves: How can we speed things up
ity with self-service provision-
opment and test infrastructure at ING in a smart way?”
ing, replacing a process that
previously took eight people DIRECT Australia could not meet the
The ING DIRECT team had a vision: to
three months bank’s appetite for innovation. The
provide a copy of the bank to anyone, at
Streamlined development, test, bank’s in-house team of 49 developers
any time, for any purpose, at the lowest
and deployment phases of and 18 testers needed a faster way to
possible cost. This includes the full set
delivery into one integrated, end- create new copies of the bank so they
of the bank’s applications, services, and
to-end solution, enabling ING could accelerate time to market for
configurations and 5.5 terabytes of data.
DIRECT to deliver projects faster new products and services.

2. “Our staff can now provision complete
environments in minutes, not months,
so we can test new ideas very rapidly.
It’s given us a competitive edge.”
Andrew Henderson
CIO, ING DIRECT Australia
“What we were looking for was a Bank works, servers, and storage arrays. They our infrastructure, saving a huge amount
in a Box, an instant environment that asked us to help them make it work.” of network bandwidth, storage space,
reproduced our own in all its complex- and processing power. For one envi-
ity,” says Henderson. “We recognized The solution was ground breaking. ronment that’s a saving—when you’re
that getting this right would be an “Our idea for the solution was unique, deploying many concurrently, it’s critical.
important part of transforming IT to uniting technology from across the mar-
a strategic enabler.” ket to give us the capability to innovate “NetApp technologies give us the abil-
and differentiate faster and better,” ity to provision copies of the bank
The Solution Issa says. “As far as we know, it was efficiently and quickly. Currently the
Bank in a Box: a brand-new solution a world first.” technology is amplifying storage by
ING DIRECT developed a vision for 4,000%,” says Issa. “NetApp FlexPod
Developed collaboratively by NetApp, provides efficient delivery lifecycles,
Bank in a Box, a fully integrated solu-
Cisco, and Microsoft working with letting us set up and tear down copies
tion that would enable rapid provi-
Dimension Data and ING DIRECT, the of the bank faster on as many virtual
sioning of complete environments,
solution features Microsoft applications machines as we need. With NetApp
accelerating time to market for new
built on Cisco and the NetApp FlexPod® Snapshot™ and deduplication we can
ideas. To pinpoint the best solu-
data center platform, a prevalidated, create instant snapshots of our envi-
tion across hardware, software, and
highly scalable data center solution ronment and mount them on our blade
services, the bank talked to different
that tightly integrates the Cisco® Uni- servers while automatically removing
vendors. “We wanted to take an archi-
fied Computing System™, Cisco Nexus® duplicate data to free up 20% more
tectural approach, and it became clear
switching, and NetApp® FAS storage space. NetApp FlexClone® ensures
early on that no single company would
system components. This lets develop- these multiple copies of the bank are
be able to deliver what we needed,”
ers at ING DIRECT provision environ- created quickly and occupy negligible
comments Henderson.
ments easily as part of their workflow space on the storage array. And because
NetApp engineers worked for six using Microsoft Visual Studio with Team NetApp integrates with Microsoft stan-
months with systems integrator Dimen- Foundation Server and Virtual Lab Man- dard technologies, the solution compo-
sion Data and ING DIRECT to under- agement. Behind the scenes, Microsoft nents talk to each other very easily to
stand what they were trying to achieve. System Center orchestrates the provi- form a seamless IT workflow.”
“ING DIRECT wanted to use Microsoft® sioning processes for them.
virtualization technologies so they could The solution design required little cus-
“Cisco’s server infrastructure helps tom code to enable NetApp FlexClone
integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio,”
us break down data center silos and technology to intercept the Microsoft
says Corey Adolphus, consulting sys-
establish a single compute platform Visual Studio workflow, make an instant
tems engineer and Microsoft Solution
that’s completely integrated with those zero-space replica of the source data,
Specialist at NetApp. “But with up to 90
of other vendors,” says Issa. “It’s inte- and attach it back into the workflow—
concurrent copies of the bank, each tak-
grated with NetApp technologies, which all without overloading ING DIRECT
ing up 5.5 terabytes of storage, it would
help us off-load the storage seamlessly systems. “This was the glue that made
have been very intensive on their net-
behind the scenes without overloading

3. the whole idea of self-service for the The pilot was successful. “When we of the bank in minutes, not weeks, so
ING DIRECT team possible,” says Adol- showcased it to our executive team we can test new ideas very rapidly. It’s
phus. “We knew we had the capability, they were amazed to see how this tech- given us a competitive edge.”
but when we started working on this nology came together to reduce a pro-
project we weren’t sure how to inter- cess that used to take months down to “Now we can provide a copy of the
cept the workflow.” minutes,” enthuses Henderson. “They bank to anyone in the bank at any
saw straight away that it would dra- time—in 10 minutes,” says Issa. “At the
Having identified the Bank in a Box com- matically reduce development times so click of a button, developers can get
ponents, ING DIRECT needed to be sure we can get new products and services all the data they need, all the servers,
that the idea would work before invest- to market faster.” applications, configurations, testing,
ing in the solution. Working closely with and everything that goes with it, com-
NetApp, Cisco, and Microsoft, which ING DIRECT commissioned Dimension pletely verified, ready to rock and roll,
provided extensive hardware, software, Data to deliver the entire solution. This completely off the shelf. Then they can
and technical expertise, Dimension Data included end-to-end systems integra- run any test they like. It’s amazing.”
used its lab in The Rocks, Sydney, to tion of hardware, software, professional
show the solution in operation. services, and managed services across “We’re using this solution in so many
all three vendors. scenarios and we’re seeing new use
Henderson was impressed at the way cases all the time,” adds Issa. “For
the vendors rose to the challenge and “By integrating NetApp technologies example, we can give a customer ser-
collaborated to prove the solution. with the other solution components, vice representative access to all our
“We didn’t run this as a traditional IT ING DIRECT can run many copies of the customer-facing applications for train-
project—we gave everyone space to bank in parallel without overloading their ing purposes. Or give a developer a full
get us the proof we needed,” he says. systems,” says Pero Radosevic, account version of the bank at induction. And
“The way NetApp and the other ven- executive for ING DIRECT, NetApp. “We when we have customer or operational
dors collaborated to deliver a workable worked very closely with Dimension issues, it’s much easier to study and
solution was very impressive.” Data and the other vendors, particularly solve them. In fact, everything we do
Microsoft, to make what was a very is faster—our capability now supports
“We couldn’t find any reference or case complex integration possible. It was our appetite for transformation and
studies to support where we wanted to a very collaborative process.” change and delivering faster for our
go—it hadn’t been done before,” Issa customers.”
says. “But the vendors gave us confi- Business Benefits
dence. When we sat down with them we Faster, more cost-effective Easier innovation with an efficient
were surprised at how responsive they provisioning of test environments platform for testing ideas
were. Each brought their passion and “The solution enables us to streamline The solution has also freed the devel-
ideas, and fed off each other’s enthusi- processes that previously took eight opment team at ING DIRECT to focus
asm and innovation. The solution was people three months with a very simple more on differentiating the bank with
a combination of all those ideas.” self-service model,” says Henderson. an efficient and accessible platform
“Our staff can now provision copies

4. “NetApp technologies help us off-load
the storage seamlessly behind the
scenes without overloading our
infrastructure. For one environment
that’s a saving—when you’re
deploying many concurrently,
it’s critical.”
Ben Issa
Head of IT Strategy, ING DIRECT Australia
for testing new ideas. “We can now
redirect our skilled people and our SOLUTION COMPONENTS
cost base toward innovation,” states
Henderson. “We’ve said to our people: NetApp Products Third-Party Products
If you’ve got a good idea, go for your NetApp FAS3270 storage system Cisco Nexus
life—test it. Now the only thing holding SnapMirror® technology Cisco Unified Computing System
us back is how fast we can come up FlexClone Windows Server® 2008 R2 Hyper-V™
with the ideas.”
Deduplication Microsoft System Center
A cloud-enabled operating model MetroCluster technology
®
Microsoft Visual Studio
ING DIRECT has also laid the foundation NearStore® technology Microsoft Visual Studio Team
for the bank’s continued IT transforma- Foundation Server
SyncMirror technology
®
tion by establishing a cloud-enabled
SupportEdge Premium Microsoft Virtual Lab Management
operating model, paving the way for
more efficient cloud-based business Partner
Protocols
processes in the future. “A huge benefit Dimension Data
iSCSI, FCP, CIFS, NFS, FCoE
is that we’ve cloud enabled ourselves in www.dimensiondata.com.au
terms of our operating model and our IT
strategy,” says Henderson. “It’s not just
technology—wrapped around the solu-
tion is a whole set of new, more efficient
work processes.”
Solution delivery partner:
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