Deutsche Bank lifts the hood on cloud transition

New service for internal developers set to be fully operational by year's end

Financial services heavyweight Deutsche Bank has provided details of the transformation of its IT delivery, set to be fully operational by the end of the year.

Deutsche has been developing its private cloud using modular data centre designs and scalable compute platforms to offer low-cost virtualised environments for its developer teams.

The project has just won the Cloud Computer Challenge, organised by international industry group the Open Data Alliance, publishing details of its project.

"When we looked to create our internal cloud service for developers, we knew we wanted to create something radically different from what have gone before," wrote Alistair McLaurin, Deutsche Bank's London-based cloud architect.

The aim was to make the end user costs cheaper for developers than running a desktop PC, he added.

Deutsche's internal cloud is hosted in a data centre in a box - a container packed with blade servers using four 12-core processors, with network attach storage and a 10GB switch on each rack. This configuration allows Deutsche to host 2,000 virtual machines at any time.

"The initial population is set to be four racks and we expect the service to be commissioned at the end of 2011," McLaurin wrote.

To make the system as user friendly as possible, developers can access it using Deutsche Bank's identity management architecture, primarily based on Microsoft Active Directory, which provides the foundation for its web single sign-on service. Once authenticated, users can request a new virtual machine to be assigned to them. Any authenticated users that have appropriate permissions can then connect to Deutsche's package repository, to download a standard set of Solaris, Linux and Windows operating systems.

Deutsche can track software licensing requirements because the cloud service is tied into its authentication architecture, giving it insight into who is using what and when. "This is normally a challenge for virtualised environments, especially VMs with a high turnover," McLaurin explained.

The system has been designed with security that could be used in future for external hosting, according to McLaurin.

Deutsche is looking to develop the service to support a wide range of production applications that don't have 100 per cent uptime requirements.