PrivatBank prepares migration of the DBMS in a cluster

On March 11, 2014 the Sybase CIS company and PrivatBank announced a successful completion of testing in PrivatBank and its transition to SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise Cluster Edition DBMS (ASE CE).

Project Tasks

Main objectives of the project: increase in fault tolerance of the systems of bank and protection of business against possible negative effects at accidents and idle times.

In process the bank had a requirement of growth of fault tolerance of the systems. The main objective of the new project - minimization and, whenever possible, an exception of a downtime of corporate systems because of failures or failure of hardware servers and the software.

Project Progress

In December, 2013 specialists of bank and Sybase CIS company installed and customized test cluster system on the platform of the SAP solution Sybase ASE CE and held functional and stress testing. As the application for work with cluster DBMS the real system operating in bank working in the test mode and generating multiple typical user tasks is selected.

First of all the mode of high availability to minimization of a downtime of corporate systems because of any kind of failures is tested. At such mode the disk storage with the database is separated between two physical servers. But along with disk storage (i.e. with the database) only one of copies works (node) of the ASE CE server, and the second copy is in permanent waiting. That the application supported such mode, the line of application connection was a little changed.

Then on the working node different possible problems are tested:

• failure or failure of the hardware of a working node of a cluster and failure
• hangup of an active copy of SAP Sybase ASE DBMS.

When the existing application faced the above described problems, all set client connections automatically migrated on a reserve node of a cluster of SAP Sybase ASE and there continued the work. For those connections which at the time of failure had not complete transactions rollback of such transactions with an output of the corresponding message in which transaction repetition was recommended to the user was executed.

Testing is held successfully. At all checked types of failures client connections automatically migrated on a reserve node, then, when raising the main copy, client sessions can come back on the main node of a cluster.

The bank positively estimated results of testing of SAP Sybase ASE CE and signed the agreement on acquisition of the licenses SAP Sybase ASE Cluster Edition for the subsequent migration for the cluster version of SAP Sybase ASE DBMS of all the main systems (multinuclear configurations for two platforms).

Project Results

The next stage the PrivatBank sees optimization of applications and the database scheme for balancing and load distribution when opening new user SAP Sybase ASE CE sessions selects the least loaded node of a cluster or evenly distributes loading between all nodes by migration of the existing connections on more free nodes of a cluster.

"The PrivatBank relies upon the solutions Sybase and examination of Sybase CIS more than 15 years. Within all these years our cooperation took place very successfully, - Michael Pavlenko, the CEO of Sybase CIS noted. - The solution to pass to SAP Sybase ASE Cluster Edition is connected with need of an exception of risk of idle time for work of bank in case of machine or program failure. The progressive tense of recovery is always very expensive. Only imagine a situation when in the central system of bank there is a failure, it stops, and within several hours through the whole country any transactions are impossible. It is natural that it is unacceptable for many reasons. Therefore SAP Sybase ASE Cluster Edition is obligatory software for any failsafe system".