Jordanian-based Arab bank has announced it has completed a multimillion dollar project to consolidate its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) data centres onto two sites using IBM and EMC technology.
According to bank executives, the refocus will help support its planned introduction of Islamic banking applications and e-cheque technology.
Two data centres in Dubai have been created, in a two-year, US$5 million project, to serve the needs of its branches across the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Yemen.
One of the data centres is run by eHosting DataFort at its headquarters in Dubai Internet City (DIC) and will be used as a disaster recovery centre, while the main data centre is based at the bank's headquarters in Deira.
The UAE banks were migrated to the data centre in November 2004, Qatar in December 2004, Bahrain in February 2005 and Yemen in May this year.
Ghassan Nimer, managing director of Arab Gulf-Tech, an IT services company carrying out the migration, said a key benefit of having consolidated data centres for its GCC branches was that it was much easier to manage the systems.
'Managing two main data centres is far better than managing eight data centres for four countries,' he explained.
"It makes it a lot easier to deploy new applications and services as these are now deployed in just one location - all we need to do is train the users in the other countries.
"All the data centre staff are in one location where they can provide better services than having the same people scattered between four countries, he said.