Johannesburg, 05 Dec 2014
Business environment:
* Established: 1999; independent company since 2006
* Employees: 45
* Provides SWIFT wire transfer transaction services
* More than 80 customers in 16 countries in Africa
Headquarters: Pretoria, South Africa
Industry: SWIFT Service Bureau
Implementation team: Trustlink and Vision Solutions
Critical issue
Every day, enormous sums of money fly around the globe at the speed of light. The majority of those international financial transactions travel as messages through the member-owned Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).
If SWIFT's processing was not available, many global financial transactions would be at a standstill. Thus, as a SWIFT service bureau, Trustlink cannot afford its systems to go down, whether for planned maintenance or unplanned events.
Results
* Provides the ability to recover right up to a point of failure;
* Replicates the entire server, not just data;
* Dramatically reduces potential downtime;
* Runs virtually unattended; and
* Provides peace of mind.
Technologies
Software:
* Double-Take Availability
* Windows Server 2008 R2
Hardware:
* Dell servers
Business challenge
With so much depending on it, a SWIFT service bureau such as Trustlink can't risk failure of its systems. If SWIFT data or applications were unavailable, money would stop flowing. The cost to Trustlink and its customers would be incalculable.
Nevertheless, systems do go down. It's inevitable. Hardware and software may be reliable, but they're not infallible. The way to keep the business running despite these unavoidable outages is to maintain a ready-to-run replica server that can assume responsibility for operations when necessary.
However, copying data without duplicating all of the system settings and environment states would not be sufficient. In that case, it would take considerable time to fix incorrect user profiles, configure the backup server, and restore any necessary infrastructure software. Trustlink was aware of a few products that could copy data, but it needed a solution that would maintain a real-time replica of all of its data and ensure the backup server was always in a ready-to-run state.
Solution
When Trustlink went looking for an availability solution, there was already a product that was recognised by the SWIFT community: Double-Take Availability. Double-Take Availability replicates a complete production server - including data, applications and configurations - to a backup server. It then keeps the two servers synchronised in real-time so the backup is always ready to assume the production role.
Beyond data, Double-Take Availability also replicates Trustlink's file permissions and multiple MQSeries queue managers.
Trustlink is certain that Double-Take Availability successfully protects the availability of its critical SWIFT server because it tested the solution. In fact, it has to. The SWIFT Alliance mandates all SWIFT service bureaus have a backup environment and that they test a failover to that environment at least annually.
During its test, Trustlink completed a failover to the backup environment in 13 minutes and 33 seconds. The failover was so successful that the company decided to stay on the backup system longer than planned.
In addition to minimising downtime, Double-Take Availability also protects all user and system data, right up to a point of failure. That wouldn't have been the case with other solutions. They would have incurred at least some replication latency. In an environment such as Trustlink's, protecting all data is imperative because the loss of any transaction data is unacceptable.
Ease of use is another important benefit. Double-Take Availability allows failovers to happen quickly, easily and accurately.
Dave Elliott, Executive Director: Solutions; Andre Niemand, Manager: Solutions Services; and Jan Engelbrecht, Systems Engineer, concurred when asked what was the biggest benefit they receive from Double-Take Availability: peace of mind. Double-Take Availability gives them confidence that their SWIFT data and applications will always be available, no matter what.
How satisfied is Trustlink with Double-Take Availability? Very. The company plans to roll it out to servers in other areas of the company's business. What's more, Trustlink is so confident in the solution that it has signed up as a Vision Solutions Business Partner and now resells Double-Take Availability.
Share