Business continuity and high availability are particularly crucial to Bankart because it is in the business of running card authorization for every automated teller machine (ATM) in Slovenia and for half of the country’s Point of Sale (POS) systems. Bankart’s 1,700 ATMs process almost eight million transactions in an average month, rising to 8.5 million in peak months. Bankart also runs a collection center that monitors and processes direct credits, debits, and standing orders for all the country’s major banks and companies. “Our service is a public infrastructure and if our systems go down, thousands of people will suffer,” says Gregor Pirc, IT manager for Bankart. “We cannot afford to be down for even a few hours, so we turned to HP for the solution.”
First, HP conducted a business continuity assessment and a series of backup strategy workshops, then came up with recommendations to enable Bankart to meet its service-level agreements by ensuring business continuity and high availability. At the core was the establishment of a secure disaster recovery site with constant data replication between HP NonStop servers and storage area networks (SANs). Bankart’s authorization system runs on two NonStop servers located at the main production site in Ljubljana, and the disaster recovery site 10 kilometers away. Data is constantly replicated online between the two nodes using GoldenGate software that provides real-time continuous feeds of data. The collection center is built on a Microsoft® Windows® platform using HP servers, and HP Services configured three HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) systems into SANs with StorageWorks Continuous Access EVA deploying data replication at disk level.
As a result, vital business continuity is ensured and Bankart can deliver on its service levels to the citizens of Slovenia and its financial community. Maintaining high availability enables Bankart to comply with government and industry regulations concerning financial data. In addition to delivering high availability, the solutions also bring cost savings and simplified management. Last, a basis has been formed for future information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies to ensure document retention, data archiving, and customer privacy.
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This news is published on NonStop Computing websites. February 2008.
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