PostBank banks on Technology Associates Kenya & HP.

Late FY 2004, Technology Associates  Kenya won Kenya’s largest data centre project, bagging the coveted PostBank Kenya deal. Beating SUN and IBM, Technology Associates Kenya and our partners HP positioned the HP Alpha GlobalServer 1280, an 8 processor powerbox using the industry leading COD (capacity-on-demand) specifications to win this hugely sought deal.

Kenya’s largest bank, serving over 3 million customers over a large country-wide branch network, will use the new platform to process the bank’s netSymbols core banking application. A solution from System Access, netSymbols runs off Oracle 9i and demonstrated the best benchmark on the Tru64 Unix platform by the bank’s IT department. The exercise was carried out in an unprecedented lab-test program at HP Labs in France. The entire evaluation of the proposals for this project was undertaken in one of the most professional exercises in the country.

The project also included the installation of the regions largest Storage Area Network (SAN), with HP’s largest storage line in the EVA 5000 system, an ultra-high performance, ultra-high capacity and ultra-high availability "virtual" RAID storage solution offering scalability upto 35 TB on end- to-end 2GB fibre channel technology. HP OpenView DataProtector software and HP Openview Storage Management Appliance software provide centralised configuration, management and monitoring of the entire SAN fabric, while simplifying management tasks and reducing cost.

The below schematic demonstrates the netSymbols dataflow between the head office and the branch network.