Broker aims for zero downtime

Online investment broker Charles Schwab is to use systems management tools from Veritas Software to ensure its ebusiness operations are continuously supported.

The broker's online trading site has shown explosive growth in the past three years, with transactions currently running at one million a month in the UK alone.

Such traffic comes at a price, however. With online trading even more volatile than other ebusiness ventures, there is a vital need for 100 per cent reliability from anywhere in the world: any downtime would be disastrous, both for the company's customers and its reputation.

According to John Hale, the firm's director of IT service delivery, Schwab needed an "insurance policy", and chose data storage and backup company Veritas Software to provide it. The company's goal is for all customers worldwide to be able to access all of its services, both through brokerages and online, 24 hours a day.

The Veritas solution for Charles Schwab consists of four storage, backup and reliability products.

The Cluster Manager helps to insure availability through the clustering of up to 32 servers, and providing immediate fail-over between servers in the cluster.

This allows Charles Schwab to handle both planned and unplanned downtime, while the Volume Manager optimises storage and allows for real-time disk and data management, including a toolkit which dynamically analyses storage optimisation.

Volume Manager centrally manages all storage devices on a domain from a single command line graphical user interface.

To manage mission-critical data across the whole of the European organisation, the Volume Replicator - an enhanced and expanded version of the Volume Manager - is used to create and maintain multiple copies. This ensures that there is no single point of failure in the cross-European network.

The final part of the Veritas portfolio is its NetBackup application, which backs up all of the data on a given cluster to tape libraries, according to dynamically changeable backup policies.

"We chose Veritas Software because it is the only company that is able to deliver a complete, integrated and functionally rich portfolio of data availability software," claimed Hale.

First published in Computing