Westpac has brought IBM private cloud into its hybrid platform-as-a-service (HPaaS) that it has spent several years designing and assembling.
The bank has been trying to present the Westpac group businesses with a single, unified IT infrastructure since 2014, under a project codenamed Agilus.
In September 2016, it began to stitch a range of cloud and IT infrastructure components together into standard patterns and services that could be used and re-used by its business groups.
Westpac’s entire application portfolio is ultimately set to run in the HPaaS environment, with 60-70 percent in private/public cloud and the rest remaining hosted on internal infrastructure.
Cloud provisioning options in the HPaaS will include IBM Cloud for VMware and some public cloud options, although the bank said these won’t be ready until next year.
IBM Cloud for VMware consists of VMware vCenter Server (VCS) on dedicated hardware hosted in two IBM cloud sites in Sydney.
Westpac users had the option of provisioning either bare metal or virtual machine instances in IBM through the HPaaS interface.
With the services running across two availability zones (AZs), a number of configurations are possible.
Westpac said its businesses would be able to consume disaster recovery and service continuity services across both AZs.
It said it is “evaluating” an undisclosed number of other services that are available within the IBM cloud for their suitability to be offered to Westpac group IT users.
Within the IBM cloud, group users could choose to run workloads in either a high availability (HA) or active/passive construct.
Further options for splitting workloads between clouds are likely to come online next year when access to public clouds like Azure and AWS is likely to be offered from within the HPaaS.
Westpac indicated it is still assessing its public cloud options.
“The HPaaS model will bring a combination of public cloud and on premise cloud next year,” Westpac said in a statement, pointing to the staggered availability of different compute resources.
Westpac CIO Dave Curran said today that the first capabilities of HPaaS were now live and being presented to business users.
“Application deployment, infrastructure provisioning and network connectivity is now available on demand, with all aspects treated as code,” he said.
“We’ve seen a massive reduction in the time it takes to set-up and host applications with a 40 percent saving in set-up costs from start to deployment of an application.
“What historically took weeks is now automated and happens in hours. For example service provisioning has gone from 2-4 months to 2-4 hours and application installation will be reduced from months to hours.”
