Habib Bank AG Zurich achieves 24/7 data availability with Sybase Mirror Activator

Traditional banking values set in the context of international banking has determined HBZ's corporate philosophy - 'Service with Security' - for over 41 years in operation.

Providing trade finance, corporate, consumer, private, retail and correspondent banking products, the bank offers highly personalized service to its customers through its international network in 10 countries globally.

In addition to offering traditional banking products over a number of channels, HBZ's leading technology solutions, hPLUS, from BiLOGiC Systems Inc., enables HBZ clients to manage their accounts and conduct real time transactions 24 hours a day world wide online.

HBZ wanted to raise standards and ensure a completely reliable data recovery system in case of disaster.

It set out to find a disaster recovery system with exceptional data recovery capabilities that would help the bank eliminate database downtime - a step that would reduce both the risks and the costs associated with system outages.

To overcome these challenges, HBZ turned to BiLOGiC Systems, which recommended Sybase Mirror Activator thereby allowing HBZ to dramatically reduce failover time, and restore availability in seconds with no data loss.

According to Mr. Baha AlSamawi, Sales Manager, UAE & Oman of Sybase Products Middle East, 'Application downtime is an operational risk that can potentially cost banks millions of dollars. Each second the system is unavailable translates into lost trades, missed transactions and ultimately lost revenue. HBZ's requirement for 24/7 availability and a zero loss data recovery system could be only achieved with Sybase'.

Sybase Mirror Activator leverages synchronous disk mirroring to guard against data loss, as well as transaction replication to ensure data integrity by removing the possibility of replicating corrupted data.

Meanwhile, expensive hardware that normally lies dormant as the standby server is being utilized for other applications, such as reporting and decision support, significantly increasing the return on investment for these assets.

With this solution, organizations are not only able to increase data availability, ensure data integrity, eliminate data loss and reduce network bandwidth costs but are also able to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO).

'HBZ has been leveraging Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise within our IT infrastructure since 1994 due to the database's reliability for mission critical transaction environments.

The addition of Mirror Activator enables us to dramatically lower the total cost of ownership of our business continuity infrastructure by reducing failover time, leveraging the normally cold standby database for reporting and decision support as well cutting network bandwidth requirements.' says Mr. Reza Habib, Joint President, HBZ

'Sybase Mirror Activator was a perfect choice because it easily satisfies our disaster recovery and back-up needs. It is is very stable and reliable. It also meets all our requirements regarding enterprise data replication and guarantees that data at the disaster recovery site is real-time, synchronous, integrated and always available,' adds Mr. Haja Alavudeen, Executive Vice President & Head of IT, HBZ.

'While disk block replication systems perform a vital function, they stay synchronized by replicating blocks of data -a network-intensive process- particularly for maintaining standby database applications,' added Mr. Reza Habib.

'Sybase Mirror Activator works in conjunction with the Sybase replication system by replicating only the log of data that has changed and maintains data integrity in the process. Thus the bandwidth requirement is drastically low compared to disk block based replication. Thanks to the live standby database that can support re-routed traffic. Compared with the hours of time-to-recovery required by cold standby systems, immediate failover is possible with this lossless replication solution' he concluded.