UBL, one of the largest and most dynamic banks in Pakistan with a solid track record of fifty years – in addition to the convenience of over 1,112 branches serving 4 million customers throughout the country and 20+ overseas locations, has contracted TPS to provide High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution for their Switching Middleware, Phoenix. UBL has a huge IT infrastructure and this implementation will ensure a guaranteed uptime of one of its most mission critical applications and services, Phoenix.
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.
In the advanced e-Banking landscape, customers demand innovative services and the competitive market asks for service differentiation. With its wide array of innovative e-Banking services, UBL yet again decided to create differentiation by making its applications and hence services highly available for its customers.
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 will now ensures smooth enterprise-wide remote banking operations. Implementation of such an elaborate and effective DR strategy will guarantee its availability at all times to all its stakeholders, provide an improved IT efficiency through a continuous architecture and help avoid the unwelcome surprise of any unplanned downtime.
Phoenix Local and Global Clustering
Phoenix will be clustered at a Local as well as at the Hot DR Site. This will guarantee High Availability of UBL’s Alternate Banking Services 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 the 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 will be transferred to secondary server at the DR site automatically
Remote High availability
Taking the high availability solution beyond the local site, UBL will have its mission-critical data replicated to a remote disaster recovery site. Real-time Replication will be done of the Servers’ data 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. This failover process will take a few minutes and is completely transparent to the end-user as they don’t have to make any configuration changes in their environment.
