Customer Story

Heritage Bank

71

Mini branches

$71 billion

(Aus) asset base

95

ATMs

Critical Issue

Heritage Bank relies on Rocket Software’s (previously IBM’s) UniVerse Database system for its critical production system processing. Providing online processing services for its 59 branches and community branches, 71 mini branches and 24/7 services including online and phone banking. Given the importance to honor its People First culture, Heritage strives to provide the highest system availability possible for its members.

Business Challenge

Heritage’s existing production host system hardware had reached the end of its useful life, plus upgrades to AIX and the UniVerse software were required. Backup times were extending and due to limitations within UniVerse, Heritage needed an enhanced recovery and downtime management solution.

In addition to meeting high service level requirements, a range of challenges needed to be addressed. Put simply, all member account information must be completely protected and readily available at all times. Any interruption or loss of this important data could be disastrous.

Heritage Bank logo

Client profile

Heritage Bank Limited

  • Established through mergers in 1981
  • More than 300,000 members
  • $7 billion (Aus) asset base
  • 59 branches & community branches, 71 mini branches
  • 95 ATMs
  • 24-hour personal and business online banking
  • 24-hour telephone banking

Solution

Assure MIMIX HA for AIX

“Heritage chose Assure MIMIX HA for AIX because it provides us with the ability to restore UniVerse to any point-in-time, in the event of an unexpected interruption, as well as to recover lost or damaged files in a timely manner.”

John Williams General Manager Technology and Payment Systems

Solution

Heritage Bank Limited uses Rocket Software’s UniVerse platform, which provides them with an efficient member processing system that effectively supports diverse service offerings by integrating customizable core functionality with an extensive suite of complementary products and services.

John Williams, General Manager Technology and Payment Systems, knew that Heritage needed a replication solution that could provide a rapid restoration of all services in case of a failure of the primary host system or the loss of the data center.

“Heritage chose Assure MIMIX HA for AIX because it provides us with the ability to restore UniVerse to any point-in-time, in the event of an unexpected interruption, as well as to recover lost or damaged files in a timely manner,” Williams said.

Assure MIMIX HA for AIX protects data and applications by replicating changes in real time to a second AIX environment. Assure MIMIX HA for AIX allows rapid recovery of one or many deleted or corrupted transactions, no matter whether they were lost through user error, malicious activity, software corruption, security breach or virus attack. Best of all, Assure MIMIX HA for AIX includes the ability to recover data from a chosen point-in-time.

In addition, Assure MIMIX HA for AIX provides true high availability for AIX environments through continuous self-monitoring and automated failover, ensuring that business-critical applications stay protected, available and productive for employees, customers, and partners.

“Assure MIMIX HA for AIX ensures that the UniVerse platform, and all the services and functionality it supports, are replicated to our disaster recovery site within seconds. The solution allowed us to reduce our disaster recovery time from an hour to approximately 30 minutes.”

“With Assure MIMIX HA for AIX, we can take a snapshot of the backup system at the disaster recovery site and use it to run our tape backup procedures while the production server remains online. This improvement alone saves Heritage more than one hour of operational processing time six days per week,” stated Williams.

By providing point-in-time recovery capability, the software ensures that should anything corrupt or accidentally delete a record, Heritage can “roll back” in time and retrieve a complete copy of the data before the incident.

In addition to reducing planned downtime for tape backups and ensuring rapid recovery of any data, with Assure MIMIX HA for AIX, should the production server fail unexpectedly for any reason, or should it need to be shut down for maintenance or upgrades, operations can be switched to Heritage’s backup server quickly and automatically, with confidence that all the data and applications will be available and up to date.

Williams added, “Assure MIMIX HA for AIX provides us with a complete backup of our member account records to ensure our member data has integrity and is always available and up-to-date.”

Results

  • Eliminated threat of extended unplanned downtime to critical UniVerse platform.
  • Reduced disaster recovery system failover timeframes.
  • Provided point-in-time recovery on critical UniVerse platform.
  • Provided processing efficiencies around system backup and end-of-day processing.

 

Technology

Technology used

  • Assure MIMIX HA for AIX
  • UniVerse Database
  • 2 IBM Power Systems running IBM AIX

Assure MIMIX HA for AIX

Protect IBM AIX servers from downtime and lost data with easy, automated solutions for high availability and disaster recovery

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