Travelex pumps up the volume

The financial services conglomerate is fusing its merged storage assets into a workable disaster recovery system.

29 million is a lot of customers to process each year. The sheer volume of transactions is something which financial services company Travelex has to deal with above all else, but being a travel-related company in the wake of the outbreak of terrorism has created further challenges - not to mention the integration headaches of a merger.

The Travelex Australasia Group is the local arm of a global financial solutions giant covering 97 countries. The company merged with the financial services arm of travel agency Thomas Cook during 2001, and now claims to be the world’s largest foreign exchange specialist. The merged IT environment included a mixed platform of Windows 2000, HP, Sun, SAP, MS Exchange, Microsoft SQL, and Sybase servers with a mix of in-house developed, and third party applications. If merging all of that wasn’t enough problems, the local group had to adhere to new standards introduced with the passing of the Financial Services Reform Act - and shore up its defences against terrorism with a business continuity plan.

Both of the pre-merger entities had their own contingency plans for disaster recovery and business continuity planning, but the merger highlighted a need for a more streamlined approach, especially as the company operated in multiple domestic and overseas sites according to Travelex Australasia Group’s IT director, Stephen McCarthy.”After the two companies merged, we conducted a global review of our disaster recovery and business continuity planning, and found that we needed to do some more work,” said Mr McCarthy. “The main issue we identified was that we had too many ways of doing things.”

Travelex conducted a business impact analysis, whose conclusion was that although the company’s disaster prevention planning was comprehensive, the duplication was uneconomic and ineffective.

”For instance, we did log shipping for applications in one case, we did overnight recoveries to a remote offsite location in another case, and we shipped tapes offsite in a third example,” said Mr McCarthy. “We had a series of disparate BCP scenarios - we could fail over to a Melbourne operation in some cases, and Auckland in another.”

The company recognised that without a consolidated corporate disaster recovery scenario, it was at serious risk.

”We didn’t have a fixed plan covering every single business process. We wouldn’t have ended up in a disaster, but we would have had to act like heroes to actually get to the point of recovery,” said Mr McCarthy.

Travelex conducted a review of the available options from various storage management companies in Australia and chose Veritas for several specific reasons, according to Mr McCarthy.

physical presence

”The criteria we looked at was quite deliberate,” he said. “We wanted a Tier One supplier. We wanted a support organisation in Australia - and preferably in Sydney - because we weren’t prepared to go with a company that was going to connect us through to someone in California or India. Physical presence in Australia was critical.

”We also wanted a proven product. We preferred products that were vendor-independent from a hardware perspective because we tended to find some products in the past worked very well with other products made by the same company, but if you went outside the very tight box, we encountered unnecessary and frustrating problems.”

Although the relationship with Veritas and Travelex was still in its infancy, Mr McCarthy said he was pleased with the implementation of the three Veritas products - Volume Manager, Volume Replicator and NetBackup.

”Travelex didn’t go to Veritas for a product; we came to them to ask what products would solve this issue,” said Mr McCarthy.

The solution, tailored specifically to the requirements of the Travelex Group, required an infrastructure that was highly dependent on replication, which means it had a high level of availability without clustering. Using two SANS - one live and the other a “shadow” SAN for disaster recovery - with a 40 Mbps microwave link between sites, the solution allowed the company to segregate servers to accommodate the different financial markets in which it trades without the threat of losing valuable data.”The solution met our particular infrastructure requirements for proactive data capture and the ability to react quickly in the fast-moving financial services sector,” said Mr McCarthy. “Our business impact analysis required Travelex to have a stringent DR strategy. With Veritas we have achieved this requirement, which means we now have an uptime of 99.999%. This level of high availability is essential for a company like ours, and it gives us the confidence that we will almost always be able to meet the demands of our customers.”