Gary Carter, general manager IT relationships and group data warehouse at St George, told ZDNet Australia the facility would be located at the institution's existing disaster recovery "hot-site" and be able to operate at around one-quarter of full production capacity.
Carter said the NSW-based bank previously did not have a disaster recovery facility, with the answer to any severe difficulties being "to ring our data warehousing supplier, NCR Teradata, and ask them to ship in a new machine".
The acquisition of a backup facility was justified, he said, by the fact the group data warehouse was the core data and information source for the institution's management information and reporting, customer relationship management, marketing and Basel II Capital Accord risk solutions.
While all customer relationship management, management information system and other functionality would duplicate that of the primary system, there would be restrictions on the ability of staff to run queries. Presently around 200 staff at St George do so.
The move comes as St George chief information officer John Loebenstein confirmed the institution had purchased a NCR 5400H server in mid-February to replace its existing four-year-old machine from the same supplier. The new data warehousing solution is expected to be operational by the end of March.
Carter said St George was continually developing and refining its data mining, on-line analytical processing, customer relationship management and marketing programs, "which operate on atomic levels of data to reveal insights. Not to mention the Basel II Capital Accord that requires a vast amount of storage of data.
"Even if ... St George ... was not engaged in all these fantastic programs we would be replacing our NCR/Teradata hardware because it is now four years old....the total cost of ownership of the new model makes (it) the right choice for many reasons," Carter remarked. As well as a lower TCO, the new solution delivers an "order of magnitude more throughput and increases in addressable storage.
"So while we have used some very aggressive compression techniques to conserve storage we now find we have hit the limit and need to grow," he said. "The Basel Accord requires many hundreds of of gig of data, our new CRM solution requires a few terabytes of data and then we have development / test / production and our disaster recovery facilities". The current equipment "maxed out" at around 1.6 Terabytes of data, Carter said.
