ACH Colombia profits from high availability with IBM XIV

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ACH Colombia (ACH) was created in 1997 by private financial institutions to facilitate the interchange of financial transactions and information in Colombia. ACH’s services include secure online payments, social security payments, direct credits and debits, and real-time transfers. Over the past year, the institution has also been accepted by SWIFT as a services provider member of the Chile Service Bureau. As one of the largest transactional services provider in Colombia, ACH holds a crucial position in the Colombian financial system.

“To meet the regulatory guidelines set out by the Colombian Financial Superintendent Office, our IT infrastructure needed to adhere to three main principles—reliability, integrity and availability,” says Luis Alberto Fernandez Pulido, vice president of operations and technology, ACH Colombia. The company began a strategic journey to simplify, standardize and stabilize its existing IT infrastructure, aiming to cut its Recovery Time Objective from hours to minutes.

Says Fernandez Pulido, “Our mid-range storage solution was approaching its capacity limits, was laborious to operate and had limited functionality. We needed a high-performance, easy-to-manage storage solution designed for growth. IBM XIV Storage System far outshone the competing solutions in terms of total cost of ownership and functionality.”

Finding the right solution

ACH reviewed all the leading storage technologies, including the IBM XIV Storage System, the NetApp FAS6000 Series Enterprise Storage system and an EMC Symmetrix solution. “The XIV system came out on top,” says Fernandez Pulido. “The IBM team ran a proof-of-concept with very impressive results, so we decided to adopt the XIV Storage System as our enterprise storage platform. XIV has fantastic integration capabilities and integrated easily with our Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows servers.”

ACH deployed the IBM XIV Storage Systems using the XIV migration tools to ensure rapid, automated migration of data from its previous systems. The migration was performed in the background while applications continued to run as normal. Fernandez Pulido explains, “With the built-in XIV tools, the migration process took less than three weeks and was very easy to manage. There was zero downtime and no perceptible impact on system performance.”

The XIV systems are housed in two different data centers, linked using the built-in synchronous mirroring software. All business-critical information is stored on the primary XIV system and instantly replicated to the second over fiber-optic connections.

Optimized utilization

ACH finds considerable benefit in XIV’s intuitive user interface. “Although XIV is a leading-edge technology, the interface is supremely easy to use,” said Fernandez Pulido. “In fact, we joke that it’s so easy that a child could operate it!” The financial services trailblazer is now able to provision new storage volumes in seconds.

ACH uses XIV thin provisioning to ensure the most efficient use of available capacity. The company has also deployed Veritas Storage Foundation from Symantec to optimize storage management—including change roles and backup support in file systems—and provide instant space reclamation. Integrated with the built-in thin provisioning capability of the XIV system, the Veritas solution leverages a cross-platform thin-provisioning optimized file system to help minimize the unnecessary allocation of physical storage.

In addition, ACH is using the built-in XIV snapshot capability for, according to Fernandez Pulido, “a fundamental part of our security strategy. When we reviewed the different storage solutions available, we found that XIV was able to complete the highest number of snapshots per day. We carry out five financial closes each day to reconcile payments; with XIV snapshots, we are now able to take a snapshot before each one. This ensures that we can instantly roll back if any errors occur during closing.”

Failover in just 12 minutes

Using Veritas Cluster Server on the XIV Storage System provides automated ongoing high availability and local cluster failover. The Symantec solution monitors all data and applications, automatically recovering applications when it detects a fault. In the event of a major failure, the Veritas Cluster Server solution restarts the failing applications at ACH’s second data center, enabling continued availability of critical applications.

The combination of IBM XIV and Symantec technologies has significantly improved disaster recovery and security at ACH. Restarting business-critical systems in the backup data center now takes as little as 12 minutes, a 97.5 percent improvement over the company’s previous Recovery Time Objective of eight hours. Equally, ACH has measured a 50 to 70 percent reduction in security risks relating to its storage system.

Reaping the benefits: up to 50 percent reduced TCO

“The benefits of the XIV solution have far exceeded our expectations, in particular, from a financial standpoint,” said Fernandez Pulido. “Thanks to our new storage architecture, ACH’s cost per transaction has gone down by 10 to 20 percent. What’s more, we have achieved a 30 to 50 percent reduction in TCO, as the XIV system cuts our administrative costs and uses much less energy per terabyte than our previous solution.”

Beyond these hard financial benefits, response times have improved up to 25 percent, enabling users at ACH to access data more rapidly and work more efficiently.

“With the XIV system at its heart, our IT infrastructure is now able to meet the reliability standards set out by the Colombian Financial Superintendent Office,” says Fernandez Pulido.

Finally, the XIV solution has enabled ACH to enter a new era of rapid growth. “The XIV and Symantec solutions have given us the availability to perform an additional 38 million transactions this year alone,” says Fernandez Pulido. “I’m confident that the XIV solution will scale effortlessly to meet our future needs.”