MasterCard consolidates storage systems

Credit card payment company MasterCard is consolidating its storage infrastructure following a huge increase in its computing requirements.

Since 1999, MasterCard has increased the number of servers it uses from five to 269, prompting a review of its storage strategy.

The company previously had agreements with EMC, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Hitachi and Amdahl, but has decided to reduce the suppliers to EMC and Sun, with a long-term aim of an EMC-only storage environment.

'Like any business, we have to depreciate our equipment over time,' said James Hull, vice president of engineering services. 'We already have investment and we have to leverage that.'

Mastercard's existing storage infrastructure is based around a series of standalone storage area networks (SAN), and Hull wants to introduce a more integrated and centralised environment.

'I need ultimate paths to the storage so this is a fully-meshed SAN,' he said.

Last year MasterCard handled over $1 trillion of purchases, reaching more than 1,000 transactions per second in peak times.

This demand produced 70 terabytes of storage data, a figure that Hull says will increase further this year.

MasterCard wants the simplicity of only dealing with a single vendor, but Hull is aware of the pitfalls associated with vendor lock-in.

'I think we have to be careful how we do it,' he told Computing. 'Although we are going with EMC and that's our choice, and it works and it's easier, it's got to have good price points.'

And MasterCard is not buying into the storage vendor's full offerings efforts yet.

'We do use Veritas software on our EMC servers for file and print,' said Hull. 'But when the EMC product becomes more robust, we'll think about migrating away from Veritas.'