GoldenGate Software, a leading provider of high availability and real-time data integration solutions, today announced that it is working with Swedbank BABS, a Swedbank company, to enable 24/7 continuous availability of its mission critical payment processing system which supports over one billion transactions per year.

Additionally, the GoldenGate high availability solution allows Swedbank to perform planned system upgrades and migrations with zero downtime.

Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Swedbank is one of the largest retail banks in the Nordic region. Swedbank BABS processes electronic payment requests for a number of Swedish and overseas banks, as well as ATM payments and payment requests from Swedbank's own customers.

Swedbank authorizes and authenticates large volumes of banking transactions using ACI's BASE24 application, which runs on two HP NonStop servers located in disparate geographic locations. By using the GoldenGate Active/Active solution, both HP NonStop systems are leveraged and thereby facilitate continuous operations. As both systems process transactions concurrently, the GoldenGate solution's conflict detection and resolution capabilities are intended to identify and automatically resolve any data conflicts. During the implementation process, the IT group determines the business rules which determine how to resolve any complex data conflicts and these can be automated via the GoldenGate solution's out-of-the-box capabilities for the BASE24 application environment.

Having the two systems actively processing transactions means that redundancy is "built in" and if one system needs to be taken offline for any maintenance work, the other takes over processing all the transactions and can efficiently handle the load. The prior payments processing system consisted of just one HP NonStop system running BASE24, which made it impossible to achieve 24/7 availability.

Magnus Kleveby, Systems Area Manager for Authorization Processing at Swedbank, said: "Before upgrading our payments processing system, we had used a 'hot' back-up site for testing the system, essentially a duplicate of the original site, as well as near-complete backups of user data. But this simply wasn't good enough for the type of system we were running.

Having evaluated various data migrationn and availability solutions, we decided to deploy GoldenGate because of its interoperability with the ACI BASE24 application, and because the solution had already been proven elsewhere at Swedbank where it was deployed by other departments. Our experience of working with GoldenGate has always exceeded our expectations in terms of service.

In the event of an unexpected outage, we can restore data within seconds and the system can cope with sudden peaks in demand, such as at the end of the month when most people do a lot of shopping or go online to pay bills. GoldenGate has given us the assurance we were looking for and we can maintain our level of customer service no matter what. We have been using this full dual site Active/Active solution with GoldenGate continuously since 2006 with no outages or service issues.

We have also used GoldenGate to migrate our payments application on to a new HP Integrity platform, running BASE24, so we could replace our existing HP NonStop servers. Using GoldenGate, this was done seamlessly and with no outage to the system," concluded Kleveby.

Richard Dobber, Managing Director for EMEA at GoldenGate BV, said: "For any banking and payments system, an outage of any kind severely impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty which ultimately effects revenue. GoldenGate's technology is designed to manage high volumes of data across the widest range of database and hardware environments and our flexible architecture allows for many different configurations. We are finding that Active/Active is the optimal deployment for mission critical environments like that of Swedbank

For More information please contact Goldengate via Email at info@goldengate.com

Normally we use this space to discuss the state of the Second User Tandem Market. In this issue we will try to address some strategic decisions one may need to make when considering selling or trading in S Series systems. Currently we see a large number of S Series customers upgrading to, or considering a future migration to, the new Integrity platform. This has caused a quick decline in value for a lot of the older S Series hardware, but demand remains for much of the newer CPU’s and higher capacity Disk Drives.