Date: May 21, 2018
Tags: high availability cluster solution
Protecting Data Aggregation, Processing And Transition Of The Central Bank of the Russian Federation With SIOS
The Central Bank of the Russian Federation (the Bank of Russia) payment system needed a High Availability Cluster Solution. The bank comprises more than 600 bank offices, 1,100 commercial banks and 2,400 side offices that provide financial services to hundreds of thousands of governmental and public organizations, and commercial companies across Russia. The complex daily account routines at all these organizations generate more than a billion electronic filings every year. In the Moscow region, these functions are performed by a dedicated organization called the Interregional Center for Informatization of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (ICI BR). ICI BR has built a special Information and Reference System (IRS) that works as a wide area network (WAN) with geographically dispersed data sources that send information to the main data center. To protect this critical system, they chose SIOS Protection Suite for Linux with data replication to ensure high availability and data integrity of IRS’s key components.
The Challenge
ICI BR chose FOBOS PLUS Co., Ltd., an experienced system integrator that specializes in building highly available data centers with an emphasis on data integrity and security features to develop the Bank of Russia payment system’s IRS. After conducting a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the IC BR needs and requirements, FOBOS PLUS engineers set out to create a system that would combine the required functionality at a moderate price. Cost factors guided the company’s choice to use industry standard platforms and open source operating systems. To achieve high availability, they implemented key components of the Bank of Russia’s IRS as fault tolerant cluster solutions. FOBOS PLUS engineers needed a solution that met a broad range of requirements.
They needed a cluster solution that would ensure high availability for both Oracle databases and custom applications and enable data replication over local area networks to eliminate shared storage use.
High Availability Cluster Solution
After detailed analysis of various cluster solutions’ features and specifications, they chose SIOS Protection Suite for Linux with data replication. SIOS Protection Suite would provide safe and seamless failover in the event of primary system faults and the ability to maintain continuous data replication between cluster nodes. The cluster was initially configured in a test environment to assure its effectiveness. And also to fine-tune the custom applications that should work in high availability mode. After the full testing cycle was completed, they needed less than a week to deploy the cluster at the ICI BR data center. They built twin two-node clusters, one located at a primary data center and the other at a backup center. Both clusters maintain continuous data replication between cluster nodes. The key reasons for choosing SIOS Protection Suite as a cluster solution included the platform’s affordable price. As well as open source operating system and support for Oracle DBMS support and custom applications. The SIOS Protection Suite High Availability Cluster Solution virtually eliminates data loss due to hardware or software faults. Also it provides high availability for applications and processed data.
Benefits
SIOS Protection Suite and its high availability cluster core achieved all project objectives quickly and with minimal expense. The solution’s scalability also allows the system to convert into geographically dispersed clusters with primary and backup data centers operating as nodes. This allow them to add disaster recovery at virtually no additional cost. The SIOS clusters will easily withstand not just one server loss but an entire primary site loss. In the worst-case scenario, SIOS Protection Suite will seamlessly restart all applications on the backup site machines. Then it would continue to provide continuous data replication to ensure little to no data loss. Finally this would enable the entire system to continue operating normally. After finishing test and deployment procedures, both FOBOS PLUS and ICI’s engineers praised SIOS Protection Suite’s intuitive graphical user interface. It allowed them to easily configure and monitor the cluster status. Furthermore, it provided comprehensive information on node and application status on a single screen. It even extends high availability by making potential problems immediately identifiable to users.
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