Central securities depository Strate has consolidated its disaster recovery process and at the same time has reduced the recovery window from eight hours to one.
Among other things, Strate is also an electronic settlement house. Without an adequate disaster recovery process, settlement of trades in equities and bonds could suffer serious setbacks.
Strate service delivery manager Dave Parry says that until recently Strate`s disaster recovery environment was spread over three sites, using mostly syndicated equipment with a recovery window of up to eight hours for the entire infrastructure.
"That simply wasn`t good enough," he says. "Restore was mainly tape-backup-based, with mirrored database log files used for roll-forward of transaction data.
"And while there was an element of high availability built into the solution, it did not cover the total infrastructure that Strate was required to operate for the financial markets it services."
Another negative was that the high availability solution was too close to the production facility, with one mainframe housed only 100m from the backup mainframe.
Strate consolidated the three sites into one, in consultation with business partners Business Connexion, SunGard and Telkom.
All critical production site data is now mirrored to the recovery centre on a real-time basis via Telkom`s LAN-Connect solution, Parry says. "Most importantly, the centre is capable of restoring operations within an hour."
The system was recently put to the test when Strate experienced a municipal power problem at its Illovo offices.
Parry says staff were relocated to the disaster recovery site where they performed their settlement functions for the day, with market participants unaware of any problems.
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