Disaster Recovery / Failover

A large international bank was under regulatory pressure to improve its systems’ resiliency in the event of disaster. Like many financial institutions, the bank performed regular drills for disaster preparedness. This bank’s failover scenario was quite complex, involving hundreds of manual steps to properly bring down applications on the main servers, verify the validity of back-up data, bring up the applications on the back-up servers, point the applications to the appropriate data, point the users to the back-up domains, and run verification tests. This process was further complicated by the fact that the actual sequence of steps differed, depending on the state of the system at the time of failure. The bank’s failover drills required ten people to execute and took approximately 40 hours to complete.

With the intuitive graphical interface of Optinuity’s software, this bank was able to rapidly model this complex process into an Autonomic Policy for failover.

Results:

• Shrank the failover process from 40 to two hours
• Reduced the manpower required to handhold the process from ten people to one person
• Met stringent regulatory requirements