Alpha banks on real-time data integration and high-availability solution from

When you’re in the money business, having access to mission-critical applications is a key element in maintaining a competitive edge. Accurate data is essential to financial institutions, helping them to manage risk, comply with regulations, improve customer service and make better decisions.

Alpha Bank Group operates more than 600 bank branches in Greece and across south-eastern Europe, and has offices in New York, London, and the Channel Islands. Its London-based operations employ around 75 people in a number of different business units, including the London branch office of the main organisation, Alpha Credit Group, and Alpha Bank London, which specialises in private banking and residential and commercial property.

Alpha Bank London Group was using an aging AS/400 server in its London data centre to handle production systems for Alpha Bank London Ltd and Alpha Bank Jersey Ltd. In an attempt to rationalise its overall IT architecture, the Group decided to consolidate the systems of all its UK-based subsidiaries and those of a new business unit – Alpha Private Bank – to this data centre.

“We realised that we could save time on maintenance and administration by consolidating to a single data centre – and even to a single server,” explains Alan Fisher, Project Manager at Alpha Bank London Ltd. “However, our existing hardware did not have the capacity to take on the extra workload, especially as we were also planning to upgrade our banking software and implement ibis s2 from Financial Objects.”

Financial transactions are time-sensitive, so it was important that the new solution should be highly reliable and keep downtime to a minimum. The existing server platform suffered occasional outages, and without an in-house disaster recovery system, there was a risk that a major failure could severely impair operations.

“We had a long-term contract with a third-party disaster recovery provider, which gave us access to hardware as and when we needed it – which meant starting from a blank system every time,” says Alan Fisher. “Whilst we have never had to put our Business Continuity plan into action, regular testing of it confirmed that it would take a minimum of six hours to have our banking software fully operational.”

Highly Secure Architecture

Alpha Bank considered a number of options before deciding to implement a new hardware infrastructure based on IBM System i5 520 and BladeCenter.

“One of the major factors in our decision was the security of its architecture,” explains Alan Fisher. “IBM has demonstrated that different business units can run in isolation on separate LPARs within a single System i5 server. This would allow us to use one physical machine to run separate instances of the new ibis s2 software for each of our business units – simplifying the IT infrastructure while meeting regulatory security requirements.”

The ibis s2 Transaction Processing engine runs under i5/OS on the i520, with a Microsoft® Windows®-based front-end application and SQL databases running on multiple Intel®-processor-based IBM HS20 blade servers in the IBM BladeCenter. DataMirror Transformation Server is used to synchronise data between the two databases in real time. A browser-based ibis s2 client is installed on users’ PCs, providing easy access to the system.

“Transformation Server is the standard software for data integration in ibis s2,” says Alan Fisher. “And the IBM System i is Financial Objects’ recommended platform. The BladeCenter was slightly more adventurous, as we couldn’t find an example of another financial institution with this set-up – but it has proved to be the right choice, offering outstanding performance for the ibis s2 front-end.”

High Availability

Alpha Bank also worked with DataMirror to ensure that the new solution would provide the high availability its business units required.

“The IBM System i5 520 provides outstanding processing power and reliability, and we haven’t had a single failure since the implementation nine months ago,” says Alan Fisher. “Nevertheless, we wanted to be sure that the new solution would stand up to component failures and software crashes, so we implemented DataMirror’s iCluster software.”

DataMirror iCluster mirrors Alpha Bank’s production systems to a second i520 and BladeCenter at a remote location, providing a fully redundant infrastructure for high availability and disaster recovery.

“Fortunately, we haven’t needed to use the failover systems yet, but we recently did a full test of our disaster recovery procedure,” says Alan Fisher. “The switch to the System i5 and Blade applications was achieved with a one-hour turn-around – a fantastic improvement on the old system. We can be confident now that a failure in the main datacentre should have no significant effect on productivity.”

David Carruthers, Managing Director of Financial Objects’ ibis division, comments: “By utilising iCluster, we can provide a fast, reliable high-availability solution for ibis s2 that is easy to implement. In a disaster recovery situation, the system can be restored in a very short space of time – an hour in Alpha Bank's case – a capability which enhances ibis s2’s status as a market-leading product.”

Alpha Bank chose IBM for its proven track record in high-quality, reliable hardware; the choice of DataMirror was based on the high levels of technical expertise shown by its sales teams, consultants and support staff.

“Working with our internal team, DataMirror did a great job on the implementation,” says Alan Fisher. “After the first instance of the new software was up and running, we managed to get the next two live and mirrored for high availability in a single weekend.”

Benefits

The response to the new solution at Alpha Bank has been overwhelmingly positive, both from IT staff and from users.

“The users like it because transaction processing throughput time has been dramatically reduced and the new front-end is very easy to use; moreover the IT team doesn’t need to spend as much time on maintenance because only one server is required for all business entities, which is easier to manage,” concludes Alan Fisher. “Although we are now running systems for four business units instead of two, the solution is easy to administer, and has delivered on the promise of high availability.

“Whilst downtime with the previous system was minimal, fixing problems took considerable time and effort from our IT staff. With this solution from IBM and DataMirror, we can be confident that our ibis s2 environments can deliver the performance we need and, more importantly, remain open for business at all times.”

DataMirror Solutions

The implications to large organizations, particularly large financial organizations like Alpha Bank, of unavailable business systems are always negative and sometimes catastrophic. Imagine the impact on an insurance company if the system that runs its customer facing applications is down, or the impact on a retail bank if its ATM interface went down, even for a few hours. Other the other hand not being able to leverage data in production systems to create reports and analytics, to distribute across the organization or to consolidate to get a complete view of the business also puts financial companies at a competitive risk.

Getting the Balance Right

Enterprises need to balance integration and availability – the business information must be shared but it is just as important to ensure the continuous accuracy and operation of production applications. Not surprisingly, IT professionals are under increasing pressure to integrate, and protect critical business information in less time and at lower cost. Get it wrong and customers can expect to experience increased response times, delays, and security risks.

As a pioneer in real-time data integration and protection solutions DataMirror understands the importance of having business applications that are constantly available and dependable. DataMirror’s real-time solutions integrate and protect data across many different types of applications, databases, operating systems and hardware platforms, from mainframe to mobile. Put simply, our quick-to-deploy solutions move high volumes of data directly between relational databases, message queues and other data stores – quickly, easily and cost-effectively and all without impacting performance of production systems and maintaining the availability of production applications to users.

DataMirror Transformation Server

DataMirror Transformation Server is a high performance, peer-to-peer data integration solution that synchronizes data bi-directionally between multiple computing platforms and moves data in real time (with lower latency than batch loading, query or message-based systems). It can be deployed quickly and easily using a graphical user interface to solve many different business problems. Rather than using triggers or performing queries against the database, Transformation Server uses best-of-breed log-based change data capture (CDC) technology to capture changed data from database logs. This ensures that the performances of even the most demanding mission-critical applications running on the source system aren’t adversely impacted. Transformation Server’s easy-to-use GUI makes it simple to select source and target databases and then configure transformations. The net result: faster implementation, lower cost, and increased return on investment.

DataMirror iCluster

DataMirror iCluster is a complete high availability and disaster recovery solution for business applications running in the IBM System i5. iCluster mirrors critical DB2 application data and objects in real time from a primary system to one or more secondary systems. With iCluster, organizations can conduct high-speed operational switching for uninterrupted data access between geographically distant locations during planned and unplanned downtime. They can also distribute processing load and network use across multiple systems. Users can use the secondary system during the mirroring process to run read-only business applications, backups or queries to improve the performance and response times of production applications.

Bottom Line

With a low-impact, high performance data integration solution, users can effectively analyze, share, and report on the information stored within mission-critical applications and avoid the implications that can result from degraded performance of operational systems. With continuous access to accurate information stored in critical production applications, organizations can have decision support 24/7 – because in today’s 24x7 world, time is money.