Metro Bank turns to Delphix to speed-up application delivery as part of shift to DevOps

Seventy-five per cent of database administrators' time saved from data provisioning tasks, claims Bank

Metro Bank, the 48-branch High Street bank founded in 2010, has rolled out Delphix's Data Virtualization platform in a bid to better manage its IT projects and to support a shift towards DevOps.

The implementation came as the Bank's development teams were running more than 30 projects in parallel using more than 100 environments, creating bottlenecks in data provisioning.

According to the Bank, each environment requires multiple data refreshes, forcing the IT team to spend more and more time provisioning data instead of developing.

Indeed, it was taking up so much time that the initial business case alone was compelling enough to fast-track the project. A single engine was deployed as a virtual appliance and synchronised with the Bank's private-cloud hosted Oracle databases.

The tool, said Metro Bank chief technology officer David Young, enabled it to "provision environments in a single day, saving a significant amount of time, as well as supporting our development teams to drive efficiencies".

He added that deployment of the platform had taken only two weeks "with little additional support".

Indeed, the bank claims to have achieved a return on investment within just six weeks after achieving an 80 per cent reduction in environment provisioning time.

The process of resetting test data, which could take the bank up to five days previously, has been reduced to just hours, claims the Bank, and the various tasks used to occupy 75 per cent of database administrators' time.

In addition, the Bank has started using Delphix for back-up and recovery for test systems and Young hopes that the platform will also provide a foundation for a shift towards a more DevOps style of culture at the Bank, with the aim of further reducing development times and to shift towards continuously delivery of improvements and new features.

Metro Bank standardised its tools and internal platforms on Microsoft and the Microsoft cloud. According to its chief customer officer Paul Riseborough, the Bank claims that it can "open an account in under 20 minutes".

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