SIOS Delivers High Availability for Large Financial Services Firm

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux Delivers HA/DR for Critical Securities Applications on Oracle Databases

One of the oldest financial services firms in China provides securities and futures brokerage as well as investment banking, asset management, private equity, alternative investments, and financial leasing services. It is listed on both the Shanghai and the Hong Kong Stock Exchanges. The firm has 343 branches (including 302 securities branches and 41 futures branches) spanning 30 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions in the Peoples Republic of China. They also operate across 14 countries including Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, London, Tokyo and Singapore and have a stable customer base of approximately 18 million customers.

The Environment

The company relies on securities trading applications based on Oracle Database. running in a Red Hat Linux operating system environment. While the firm’s IT team was backing up these applications and database frequently, they could not recover operation quickly in the event of a failure or disaster.

The Challenge

The financial services firm wanted to implement high availability (99.99% uptime) and disaster recovery protection for their critical applications and the Oracle database they rely on.

The Evaluation

The firm’s IT team wanted a clustering solution that would ensure they could reliably meet their service level agreements (SLAs) for high availability as well as their stringent recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO, RPO). It needed to be proven to provide HA in a Linux environment. They also wanted a solution that would reduce the complexity of clustering in an open-source environment.

The Solution

The firm created a two-node cluster on physical servers using SIOS Protection Suite for Linux clustering software. The SIOS clustering software monitors the entire application stack – network, storage, OS, and application. In the event of a failover, the software orchestrates the failover of application operation to the secondary node in the cluster. Application-aware modules in the SIOS Protection Suite
simplifies the complexity of configuring a cluster for Linux environments.

The Results

The firm has been using the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux clustering for many years and continually implements SIOS products in their environments. In that time, the firm has consistently met their availability SLAs. From its straightforward implementation to its reliable, easy-to-use management, the SIOS clustering software has met or exceeded their expectations.