PROBLEM:
The largest processor of credit card transactions in the U.S. had to provide both ATM and POS services to a variety of financial and commercial firms. One of these services, the Card Management Application (CMA) needed to implement a disaster recovery system to provide for updates and maintenance of debit and credit cards. However, the company’s CIO did not want to pay for the expense of having an off-site system running idle, just standing by for use only in case of a disaster. He wanted more of an active/active system running, to justify the cost of this backup system.
SHADOWBASE SOLUTION: Active/Backup Disaster Recovery:
- The CMA application is active on the source node and does not run on the target node.
- In the event of a failure, all of the applications are created on the target node; then the users are switched to that node to continue processing.
- The company initially deployed replication for just this one purpose—active/backup disaster recovery.
- As the company has gained familiarity with replication, it has expanded the use of replication into the active/active space by making replication one of the foundations for its multi-switch deployment (basically the ability of the network to survive the loss of any single node).
- The company has added replication to and from various other platforms for applications such as Oracle-based fraud detection.
(Please click diagram to enlarge)
Please click here to contact us for more information on this Shadowbase solution.
The above was adapted from the book: Breaking the Availability Barrier, Volume III: Active/Active Systems in Practice by Paul J. Holenstein, Dr. Bruce Holenstein, and Dr. Bill Highleyman. Click here for more information on the book.