Weathering Tumultuous Hurricane Season with Disaster Recovery Solution from Symantec and Juniper With its Miami data center located in the path of hurricanes, Banco Santander requires a reliable disaster recovery plan. Replacing an inefficient and risky process using archive tapes and air couriers, an integrated solution based on VERITAS Volume Replicator and Juniper Networks WX and WXC application acceleration platforms replicates data from the Miami data center to a secondary disaster recovery site in New York City. In addition to a robust, reliable business continuity plan, Banco Santander reduced hardware and network costs by more than $100,000 annually while cutting the time for WAN maintenance by 95 percent. Company Profile, one of the 10 largest banks in the world, has its headquarters in Spain and branch operations throughout Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Industry Financial Services Solution Data Protection Replication Life in Hurricane Alley During each of the major hurricanes, our employees continued to provide service to customers with up-to-theminute accuracy of data and no noticeable difference in response time. You could say that VERITAS Volume Replicator and Juniper Networks WX and WXC application acceleration platforms helped us weather every storm. Eugene Rivera Technical Support Manager Banco Santander Central Hispano The Miami branch of, Spain s leading financial institution and one of the ten largest banks in the world, is the hub for the bank s private banking operations in the United States and Latin America. While Miami is one of the hemisphere s most popular tourist destinations, it is also located in the heart of hurricane country, a fact not lost on Banco Santander s IT group. In 2004, we had four hurricanes strong enough to take our Miami data center offline, explains Agustin Abalo, senior vice president, CIO, and director of operations, Banco Santander. Without an effective business continuity plan, our banking operations would be at risk with every new storm. In addition to its Miami office, Banco Santander has offices in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Bahamas, with a secondary United States site in New York City. The Miami location has two HP L3000 Series servers while New York has a single HP L1500, all three running HP-UX 11.11. Banco Santander s primary application is TEMENOS T24, a financial application that manages banking transactions and client portfolios. An IBM UniVerse database stores the bank s financial and operational data. A wide-area network (WAN) using a T-1 line and networking equipment connects the Miami and New York offices for disaster recovery. Airlifting tapes to New York City Banco Santander instituted its first business continuity plan in the late 1990s using the New York City site as a recovery site. At the end of each day, the IT staff ran a manual backup of all the data in the Miami data center and then couriered the tapes to New York City for safe storage. In the event of a loss of data at the Miami site, an engineer in the New York City office manually restored the data from tape.
During one of southern Florida s worse hurricane seasons, Banco Santander suffered no appreciable degradation in IT operations, thanks to a disaster recovery solution from Symantec and Juniper Networks. Because of VERITAS Volume Replicator and Juniper Networks WX and WXC application acceleration platforms, our WAN now supports continuous data replication and our users get instant access to key applications. Agustin Abalo Chief Information Officer While this plan provided a level of protection and security for Banco Santander s data, it had limitations. Daily backups meant that up to an entire day s data could be at risk, depending how long it had been since the last backup. To recover this lost data, clerks would manually reenter data from hardcopy transaction records, which involved a significant operational expenditure. In examining the current process more closely, Abalo and his team focused on the problems inherent in using tape as the primary backup medium. Restoring from tape is a time-consuming process, an unacceptably long disruption to bank operations. At the same time, sending tapes by courier was expensive and involved risk, as the likelihood always exists that tapes can be lost or stolen, potentially compromising vital customer and bank information. Coupled with increasingly strict regulatory requirements for data availability, these considerations prompted Banco Santander to search for a way to reduce the amount of data at risk, shorten the downtime in the event of failure of the primary site, offer a higher level of security, and cut costs. Continuous data replication answers the need The ideal approach proved to be continuous data replication. Abalo explains: When we looked carefully at the available data protection strategies, we decided that data replication using our T-1 connection to the New York City office met our speed and security objectives better than any other approach. As Banco Santander s IT group researched available products, one name kept coming up: VERITAS Volume Replicator software (now from Symantec Corporation). We chose VERITAS Volume Replicator because of its outstanding track record in the financial industry, recalls Abalo. Cost was another key consideration because, unlike competitive solutions, does not require additional hardware to operate, dramatically lowering the overall cost of ownership. In addition, VERITAS Volume Replicator uses minimal host cycles to perform the replication function because it only backs up changed blocks, not entire files. In 2003, Banco Santander deployed to replicate data from Miami to New York City in a continuous mode. Initially, the results were as desired, with the data updated in a few seconds at the disaster recovery site. However, as the bank s backup volume continued to grow, Banco Santander s IT group noticed that the replication became slower, running into minutes instead of seconds. Also, New York City users were experiencing slowdowns using Miamibased applications, with response times as long as four seconds. The culprit was the bank s WAN. Traffic on the T-1 line was saturating the available bandwidth, resulting in transmission delays and slowing down important applications. To support the bank s aggressive growth plans, Banco Santander first looked to lease another T-1 line, but the price tag caused sticker shock. A second T-1 line alone would cost us an additional $45,000 annually, recalls Eugene Rivera, technical support manager at Banco Santander. Beyond that expense, we needed to invest in $75,000 worth of network equipment to incorporate the new T-1 line into our infrastructure. We thus decided to look for another solution. Squeezing more from the WAN Taking a completely different approach, Banco Santander turned to Peribit Networks (now Juniper Networks, Inc.). The bank deployed acceleration platforms on each end of the WAN line connecting
BANCO SANTANDER CENTRAL HISPANO Miami and New York City. The results were dramatic, according to Abalo: The Juniper Networks WX and WXC application acceleration platforms expanded our effective bandwidth by a factor of eight, at a small fraction of the cost of an additional T-1 line. Rivera is just as enthusiastic about the benefits of using Juniper Networks WX and WXC application acceleration platforms at Banco Santander: With our current solution, New York City users experience less than a one-second response time for our critical TELEMENOS application, a 75 percent improvement. Because of VERITAS Volume Manager and the Juniper Networks WX application acceleration platform, our WAN now supports continuous data replication and our users get instant access to key applications. The Juniper Networks WX application accelerator platforms also encrypts the information, offering security Banco Santander didn t have before. VERITAS Volume Replicator and Juniper Networks Application Acceleration Platforms for WAN Optimization combine to provide nearly instantaneous replication of data from Banco Santander s primary data center in Miami to its recovery site in New York City. Passing real-life tests With VERITAS Volume Replicator software and Juniper Networks WX and WXC application acceleration platforms as the basis for disaster recovery, Banco Santander s IT group is confident in its ability to maintain business continuity. Actual corroboration came during the 2004 hurricane season. As each of a succession of hurricanes bore down on the Miami area, the bank activated its disaster recovery plan as a precaution, switching from its primary data center site to its secondary location. Employees in the Miami office continued to work using the New York data center. It worked just the way we designed it, remembers Rivera. During each of the major hurricanes, our employees continued to provide service to our customers with up-tothe-minute accuracy of data and no noticeable difference in response time. You could say that VERITAS Volume Replicator and the technology from Juniper Networks helped us weather every storm. A challenge of a different kind arrives several times a year when auditors show up on Banco Santander s door. We have federal auditors as well as internal auditors from our Madrid headquarters, relates Rivera. We take them through the complete disaster recovery sequence by failing over to the New York City site and showing that we can still continue our operations. These tests have been 100 percent successful, and we can thank VERITAS Volume Replicator and Juniper Networks WX and WXC application acceleration platforms for that. Abalo picks up the compliance theme in a larger context: A number of major government regulations affect Banco Santander, including the U.S. Patriot Act and Sarbanes-Oxley. The federal government audits our disaster recovery plan based on a document called the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Manual. VERITAS Volume Replicator software helps ensure that we have the information we need to certify the bank s compliance, even in case of a natural or man-made disaster. Simplifying the administrative workload While resolving the bank s performance and data protection problems, the joint solution from Symantec and Juniper Networks has also lessened the workload on the IT staff. Abalo s team leverages the intuitive Web and Java-based administrative consoles of to save administration time. Additionally, Juniper s WX Central SOLUTION AT A GLANCE Business Drivers Ensure business continuity in face of natural disaster or other data loss Comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, Federal Financial Institutions Examination Manual, and other regulatory requirements Technology Challenges Meet aggressive Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) targets Ensure adequate application performance over the WAN Leverage existing investment to avoid unnecessary capital and ongoing expenses Solution Data replication between Miami and New York City data centers Symantec and Juniper Products VERITAS Volume Replicator Juniper Networks WX and WXC Application Acceleration Platforms Technology Environment Servers: Two HP L3000 and one L1500 series running HP-UX Database: IBM UniVerse Application: TEMENOS T24 Services VERITAS Technical Support (VERITAS Extended Support) Partner Juniper Networks, Inc.
Disaster Recovery Architecture at Banco Santander VERITAS Volume Replicator, integrated with Juniper Networks WX Application Acceleration Platform, helps provide disaster recovery protection through continuous data replication from the Miami data center to New York City data center. WAN (T1 line) HP L3000 series running HP-UX 11.11 with: TEMENOS T24 IBM UniVerse database Juniper Networks WX Application Acceleration Platform Juniper Networks WX Application Acceleration Platform HP L1500 server running HP-UX 11.11 with: TEMENOS T24 IBM UniVerse database Miami Data Center New York City Data Center Management System (CMS) and WebView provide the IT staff with a full set of detailed monitoring and reporting tools. My staff used to spend 20 hours a week investigating the latency issues on the WAN, says Abalo. Now we only spend an hour each week managing VERITAS Volume Replicator, a 95 percent reduction in WAN maintenance time. VERITAS Technical Support contributes to making life easier for the IT staff as well, from installation to day-to-day troubleshooting. Working closely with VERITAS support engineers, Rivera was able to install the replication solution in just over a day. The VERITAS support engineer was extremely knowledgeable. He helped us get VERITAS Volume Replicator software up and running quickly and configure it for maximum performance, says Rivera. We go to the VERITAS Technical Support Web site to get most of our questions answered. [VERITAS] Technical Support has an excellent selection of online resources, technical documents, and troubleshooting techniques. William Josepha Information Security Officer While Banco Santander is happy with the reliability of VERITAS Volume Replicator, there are the occasional times when something goes wrong, and the IT staff requires assistance. Online support is almost always the starting point. We go to the VERITAS Technical Support Web site to get most of our questions answered, relates William Josepha, Banco Santander s information security officer. [VERITAS] Technical Support has an excellent selection of online resources, technical documents, and troubleshooting techniques. When Banco Santander installed the acceleration platforms, Rivera called VERITAS Technical Support to help configure acceleration platforms for optimal performance of VERITAS Volume Replicator software. It took less than 10 minutes for them to walk me through it, Rivera recalls. The support engineer knew the Juniper Networks products intimately. That saved me a lot of time and got us online much faster. Improving data protection and saving money Results of the Symantec and Juniper Networks solution impressed Banco Santander, starting with the improvements in recovery performance. Thanks to continuous replication, the bank s recovery point objective (RPO), which
BANCO SANTANDER CENTRAL HISPANO BUSINESS VALUE AND TECHNICAL BENEFITS Compliance Twice-a-year audits of disaster recovery plan passed successfully Cost Savings $75,000 hardware investment avoided and $45,000 T-1 licensing fee saved per year Recoverability Less than two seconds for recovery point objective (RPO) Productivity 95% reduction in WAN maintenance time My staff used to spend 20 hours a week investigating the latency issues on the WAN. Now we only spend an hour each week managing VERITAS Volume Replicator, a 95 percent reduction in WAN maintenance time. Agustin Abalo Chief Information Officer Data Availability 75% improvement in application response time Uninterrupted service to customers during 2004 weather-related switches to secondary site measures the time span of operational data that is not protected, is now under two seconds. This RPO represents a major improvement over the 12-hour average RPO of the old tape-and-courier system. At the same time, because the replicated data is continuously available online in New York City, the recovery time objective (RTO), which specifies the time required to restore data from backup and resume operations, was reduced as well. that the bank is looking at VERITAS Replication Exec software to replicate data from remote offices to its central office in Miami. With and Juniper Networks WX and WXC application acceleration platforms, Banco Santander reduced IT infrastructure costs while still achieving near real-time replication. By minimizing the traffic on the existing T-1 line, this joint solution spared Banco Santander from having to install a second T-1 line. The costs for this additional line would have been over $75,000 in hardware costs for the switching equipment and $45,000 a year in line fees. Banco Santander is so impressed with the performance of Copyright 2005 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec Logo, VERITAS Volume Replicator, and VERITAS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. or other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.