Origina’s Expert Troubleshooting Prevents Major Data Loss for Global Bank
CASE STUDIES
4 min read
4 min read
The customer is a multinational investment bank and financial services firm, headquartered in Switzerland. They are one of the world’s largest private banks, with offices in around 50 different countries and an annual revenue of approximately $49 billion.
Financial services
Large
Switzerland
The customer remains reliant on some of their older systems, such as DB2, IBM Content Manager and IBM Storage Protect, for their day-to-day operations. These mission-critical systems ensure that they can manage massive volumes of data, ensure regulatory compliance, secure transactions, and handle archival storage. Essentially, if these systems fail, customers would be unable to access historical checks, statements or regulatory data. Much more than an inconvenience, an incident like this would be extremely damaging to an institution with a well-cultivated reputation of reliability like this customer.
However, this was the situation they found themselves staring down the barrel of when a change implementation error resulted in the deletion and accidental overwriting of essential IBM Storage Protect encryption key files. This error left the bank unable to restore its IBM Storage Protect and DB2 database- putting months of production data at risk and creating a potential catastrophe for the company.
The customer reported that during a change implementation, the dsmkeydb files for their IBM Storage Protect (TSM) database were accidentally deleted and additional data from the DB2 home directory was also removed. Their internal team acted quickly to try to correct this by restoring files, but the files were taken from a different Storage Protect instance on the same host, introducing inconsistencies between configurations. As a result, the Storage Protect database was left in an unhealthy state, and restore operations began to fail with DB2 SQLCODE -2033 and TSM error code -50. This error occurred within a production banking database, meaning there was potential for a very serious loss of data. The race was on to address the issue and the stakes were extremely high. As one of Origina’s Global Product Experts noted if this incident hadn’t been addressed quickly and effectively “Many months of work would have been lost”.
Like countless other businesses recently, the organization’s port of call to avoid the on-coming storm was Origina’s expert maintenance and support. They logged a priority 1 (P1) ticket with Origina’s service team and their case was picked up straight away. Origina supports all versions of customer licensed products- including those no longer covered by OEM support. Origina’s unique approach to support also meant that the bank had a dedicated Global Product Expert who already understood their environment and could immediately dive into figuring out the best way to help them avoid disaster. Within minutes of the P1 ticket being logged, the organization found themselves on a call with product experts determined to address their issue as soon as possible.
During this live troubleshooting session, Origina’s experts systematically analysed backup procedures, key restoration attempts, configuration files, and DB2 logs. Through this deep-dive analysis they quickly managed to track down the issue and implement a solution. Rather than a missing key, as originally feared, the real issue stemmed from incorrect configuration files. DB2 was pointing at the wrong TSM server port, preventing proper access to required backup files. Critical library and NFS port configuration files had been misplaced or replaced with files from a different instance. After identifying and correcting the port and configuration mismatches, the restoration process immediately succeeded. The entire issue was resolved within SLA, and most importantly- no data was lost.
Thanks to Origina’s rapid response and expert product knowledge, a major global bank managed to:
Origina offers expert, rapid-resolution support that not only solved the immediate crisis but also helped the customer avoid prolonged downtime, regulatory exposure, and massive operational disruption.
Origina could be the answer.
Get in Touch Today