By Olivia Ho

THE need to cope with escalating data management and transactional demands prompted the Bank of Singapore (BOS) to overhaul its data storage infrastructure.

Previously, it could take the bank's staff a whole day to retrieve a single archived e-mail message.

'We needed a system that was highly scalable, future-proof, feature-rich, and capable of handling a high volume of transactions,' said Elaine Lee, head of IT at BOS.

The result: two new data centres, serving as disaster recovery sites for each other, which let staff retrieve archived messages and other data in a matter of seconds. It also lets BOS roll out more applications to help grow its sales, Ms Lee said.

The new system has been a big step forward from the bank's previous one - which is based on the Storage Area Network (SAN) technology, a high-end enterprise storage system that lets users easily connect to a multitude of computing devices over a network.

With the previous system, the bank's four-man IT team has had to perform numerous manual tasks to maintain the system. For instance, in order to restore data, Ms Lee's team has to recall tapes from the bank's outsourced disaster recovery site.

Such manual chores are now no longer required with the current system, which comprised a combination of SAN and Network-Attached Storage (NAS) systems from US storage vendor NetApp. NAS, like SAN, is a form of storage technology that lets users access data over a network.

Ms Lee said BOS is looking forward to more savings. With its second data centre up and running, the bank aims to bring its outsourced applications - including Internet banking and e-mail - back into its fold.