European Fund Services choose Origina to implement a High

Availability and Disaster Recovery solution

Introduction:

Origina facilitated a half a billion pan-European financial services acquisition by implementing a High Availability and Disaster Recovery solution utilising virtualisation for European Fund Services Ireland. This project won the ICT Project of the Year Award at the Irish ICT Excellence Awards 2007.

Project Summary:

In January 2006, Société Générale Securities Services (SGSS) acquired the Securities Services business of UniCredit Group for a sum of half a billion Euro, with activities in Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg and Germany. Pioneer Investments (Pioneer) is the Asset Management arm of UniCredit. Pioneer's Transfer Agency (TA) activity, managing trading transactions for external customers such as Citibank, was based and operating on a pan-European level in three locations. European Fund Services (EFS), based in Luxembourg, is the Transfer Agency activity of SGSS and was hosted by Pioneer in Dublin.

An analysis of Pioneer's Information Systems highlighted that it needed to be rebuilt on a brand new IT infrastructure. As part of the acquisition, it was decided that Pioneer's Transfer Agency activity was to be moved to EFS; this meant there was now a pressing need to build a whole new business from scratch, in a new location Dublin, in a very short timeframe. This involved moving people and rebuilding an entire highly available IT infrastructure. Also, in order to sustain growth in Ireland, all Société Générale's Irish activities also had to move to new larger premises in Dublin during summer 2006. All of this work had to be ready by the closing date of the Société Générale / UniCredit merge, by the end of September 2006.

The new architecture for EFS needed to provide High Availability & Service Continuity over two data centres for disaster recovery (Dublin) servicing users in Luxembourg, Hamburg and Dublin. Origina were selected as the chosen consultancy and implementation partner with responsibility for designing, managing, delivering and supporting this new environment.

The Challenges / Issues:

EFS have to adhere to many regulatory compliance restrictions linked to the Financial Services industry; these have repercussions on the IT systems including security, data retention and data storage. EFS had to ensure that their data, due to its sensitive nature, was stored, backed up and protected in a secure and solid way.

The company is dealing with large business windows, two time zones and multiple locations, meaning all critical applications need to be up and running at all times and have very little room for downtime which would cost hundreds of thousands in terms of trading transactions per day.

There was also a resource issue, with limited IT staff available as the existing staff were busy with running the day to day operations. Origina had to provide a long-term teaming support contract on the new infrastructure on a pan-European level.

Finally, the whole project had to be mapped out, implemented and tested in a very short time-frame two months! The repercussion of not making this deadline would have amounted to enormous financial penalties for the customer.

The Solution:

Origina worked with EFS to create a new business in Dublin, designing, implementing and supporting a new infrastructure from scratch on an IBM hardware platform in an environment that was strongly positioned around Dell hardware.

Origina implemented two lights-out data centres in Dublin with 0% downtime, which are fully redundant. These are typically extremely difficult to implement. All core database systems were deployed on IBM AIX servers. The Windows server environment was consolidated and virtualised using VMware ESX 2.5 with up to 25 core business applications virtualised on two nodes per site. All databases were consolidated with Windows 2003 Server/SQL Server clusters. The network was optimised with dual attachment on a redundant Cisco Ethernet infrastructure, with VLANs extended between the data centres.

All data is stored on a SAN with high availability built into the SAN and service continuity provided by synchronous on-line data replication at SAN level. The two data centres are connected using dark fibre and all information is synchronously replicated between sites. When asked to architect a backup solution for the protection of all data, Origina utilised both the extended fibre infrastructure and the enhanced functionality of TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) to facilitate cross site backups. With this design we were able to ensure that backup data was off the production site from the initial backup. Not only did this harden the DR process, but also assisted in maintaining a 'lights-out' strategy throughout the two-site design.
 
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