UBL, one of the largest and most dynamic banks in Pakistan, implemented Symantec’s High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution for their Switching Middleware, Phoenix. UBL has a huge IT infrastructure and this implementation ensures a guaranteed uptime of one of its most mission critical applications and services. With this UBL has shielded its 420+ ATMs from any catastrophe and 1100+ branches offering interbank transactions whereby increasing the uptime of its crucial service offerings.
Today, with enterprise operations so tightly bound to timely information and data flow, IT executives in most companies are aware of the need for high availability solutions. The consequences of system failure and loss of data can have very sharp consequences including decreased employee productivity, customer dissatisfaction and the loss of current and future revenues. Yet according to research from Veritas Software some 43 percent of organizations worldwide remain largely unprepared to respond to a major disaster.
Phoenix at UBL is sitting at the heart of transaction switching where it drives its alternate distribution architecture ranging from ATMs, IVR to Visa Debit and 1Link connectivity and also provides the channel for IBTS (online inter-branch transactions). This makes Phoenix a very mission critical and essential application for the bank. Since even a few minutes of downtime of these mission critical applications is unaffordable and any data loss could be potentially catastrophic, ensuring end-to-end data protection and 24/7 availability of these systems guarantees smooth enterprise-wide remote banking operations. Implementation of such an elaborate and effective DR strategy guarantees its availability at all times to all its stakeholders, provides an improved IT efficiency through a continuous architecture and helps avoid the unwelcome surprise of any unplanned downtime.
Phoenix Local and Global Clustering
TPS will execute clustering for the bank’s critical applications through the industry’s leading cross-platform clustering solution, Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation. Phoenix is clustered at the Local as well as at the DR Site. This guarantees High Availability of UBL’s alternate delivery channels to its customers all over the country and core banking systems for its staff to offer Inter Branch Online Banking Services. A Local cluster consists of two servers hosting identical applications which can be failed over from one server to another. Should a disaster occur and one of the primary server becomes unavailable, the heartbeat detects the failure and control is transferred to another server in a local cluster. In case the whole Primary site goes unavailable the control can be transferred to a secondary server at the DR site automatically. This failover process takes a few minutes and is completely transparent to the end-user as they don’t have to make any configuration changes in their environment. To ensure availability of all alternate delivery channels, failover of all the services wll take place to the Disaster recovery site when the primary site becomes unavailable.
Real-time Replication
Taking the high availability solution beyond the local site, UBL has its mission-critical data replicated to a remote disaster recovery site through Symantec Veritas Volume Replicator. The server’s data is replicated in Real-time from the primary site to the DR site. Thus, in case the whole primary site confronts a disaster, the global cluster between primary and DR site will ensure uninterrupted continuity of bank’s operations. Real-time replication of data from primary to the DR site ensures availability of UBL’s mission critical data, with ideally zero data loss.
“UBL’s relationship with TPS goes a long way. Their solutions are extremely reliable and straight forward to implement in addition to the advantage of readily available local support. TPS being the silver partner of Symantec has the business and technical expertise needed to analyze, design, implement and support Symantec solutions.” – S.M.Abbas, SVP/Head Unibank & ATM Project Manager, UBL
