Hitachi Data Systems has announced it has been working with Allied Irish Bank (AIB) to enable its digital banking services by transforming its data center.

This is part of the bank’s strategy to transform its internal process, as well as offering “new and innovative” banking services to its customers.

AIB has partnered with Hitachi to simplify its existing multivendor storage estate and consolidate more than 14 data storage arrays into just four storage arrays using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). AIB has also adopted Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS), Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), and Hitachi Command Suite (HCS) technologies at its data centers.

AIB said it wanted to ensure a quick response to business growth and to support the cutting-edge banking technology it is rolling out to its end users. The solutions portfolio from Hitachi Data Systems gives AIB “greater visibility” of its data, making it easier to manage and allocate storage capacity.

As a result of the consolidation and transparent storage delivery, AIB said it is on track to achieve considerable cost savings over five years.

AIB selected Hitachi NAS Platform to manage increasing data growth and offer scalability and efficient tiering. The Hitachi Content Platform aims to help AIB efficiently scale business-critical information while keeping costs down, ensuring that the company can manage services and capacity more effectively.

The Hitachi Command Suite “unifies management” across the entire solution set so that AIB can “maximise return” on storage assets, and minimise operational costs. It also gives AIB a more efficient way to manage virtualised storage and lets IT to spend time on other business critical operations.

AIB said it benefits from performance visibility via a dashboard interface not only for the IT department, but also to the different lines of business across the entire bank.

Charlie Doyle, senior manager of IT division at AIB, said the two companies entered into the partnership to deliver “a leading edge” storage environment that would support AIB's technology strategy.

“The seamless migration from our existing storage platforms to our new Hitachi environment was key while delivering to the bank’s agile change agenda,” Doyle said.

“Both parties believe that the new environment will service the bank’s evolving change and technology strategy over the next five years.”