Credit in store: data storage is a key consideration as U.S. credit card processor goes live in Ireland - Special focus: storage technologies

Communications News, Dec, 2001

Nova, the third largest Credit card processor in the U.S., teamed up with the Bank of Ireland, creating a joint venture company called Euroconex, whose aim is to offer end-to-end credit card transaction processing to acquiring banks, institutions and merchants in Ireland and the U.K. The company plans to expand throughout Europe, where the outsourcing of retail payment processing has been limited. Customer service activities depend on an entirely new IT system, and will enable storage of call-monitoring recordings and imaging documents.

Custom designed with the help of Datalink, a U.S.-based network integration consultancy, the system relies mainly on a Windows 2000 active directory infrastructure. Euroconex, however, also intends to use Oracle and Sun Microsystems' Java technology for its merchant accounting database, so it required a data storage system capable of servicing multiple platforms. The firm turned to MTI's Vivant 20 (V20) for multiplatform high-availability data storage--scalable and easy to manage--when its storage area network (SAN) in Atlanta was in need of more capacity.

The core of the company's SAN and network-attached solution (NAS) solutions, the Vivant V-series of products delivers continual access to online information, and is used in distributed computing environments, or as a focused storage solution for applications with specific processing requirements.

"Nobody else did Windows 2000 with a storage area network on the back end," says Matthew Yeager, senior systems architect at Datalink.

"We had already learned a lot from the system implementation in the States, and we wanted to take what we had learned from this project and bring it with us to the Irish development," says Gene Budd, director of technical support at Euroconex. "When we sourced a storage vendor in the States, we looked at all the main players and asked them to test the products over a two-month period. MTI provided us with the most cost-effective solution."

MTI provides support capabilities for comprehensive enterprise storage solutions for an increasing number of Global 2000 and high-growth Internet companies. For its total data storage solutions, a group of complementary services can be implemented, as needed. Euroconex decided to base the systems infrastructure around the Vivant 20, which provides a storage capacity of 1.5 TB, and upgrades to 4.5 TB with the adjunction of more disks.

The system is fault-tolerant, thanks to two Exchange 2000 high-availability nodes implemented in an active-active clustered configuration. Each of these nodes is capable of handling its counterpart's burden should there be failure. They are connected to the V20 through host bus adapter Fibre Channel cards, a configuration that also allows data to be fully accessible during maintenance operations through rolling upgrade techniques,

Disaster recovery and backup is also provided by MTI, with the new version of Legato backup software on automated tape libraries (ATL) for off-site storage. ATLs support a wide variety of backup and archival requirements in almost all environments. "We did some testing of the disaster-recovery element of the system on a temporary system recently, and we can be up and running again, with full Windows content, within 20 minutes," Budd explains.

The backup and restore solutions, available as stand-alone or add-ons to the V20, combine hardware, software and services to increase productivity and to ensure business continuity.

Euroconex users can access their data, no matter which computing station they are using on a particular day-- achieved by including user directory folders in the user profiles stored in the active directory, then storing directly on the V20. All Microsoft Office documents are automatically saved to the user directory located on the server.

In addition, Exchange 2000 is able to implement separate databases for individual user groups and achieve higher availability, instead of having a single contiguous database for all users. Nine separate logical unit numbers have thus been created on the V20, where all data resources will be centralized.

According to Budd, the Euroconex experience will now benefit Nova's U.S. operation and enable the company to collapse one of its data centers there. "The clustering technology built into Exchange 2000 will now allow one clustered server to serve multiple sites, without the worry of having one system down bringing the whole e-mail system to a halt," he says.

www.mti.com

Circle 271 for more information from MTI