Achieving data resiliency with near-zero RTO and RPO

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

A market-leading bank was becoming increasingly reliant on its Big Data environment, and many Line-of-Business customers wished to migrate applications onto this environment for advanced analytics purposes. With so much at stake, the bank was looking for an improved replication and disaster recovery solution to safeguard this increasingly vital part of the business.

SCENARIO

• With more than 1,500 business-critical applications, spanning thousands of nodes and multiple users, the bank was under huge pressure to guarantee instantaneous recovery.
• The bank was looking for a way to replicate metadata, both for analytics purposes and to synchronize its security policies, managed by LiveHive and LiveSentry.
• It also wanted to reduce costs by creating a data lake for all its advanced analytics applications, but this threatened to introduce risks to the security of this data.
• The bank wished to test the performance of the proposed architecture by trialing use cases, and aimed for a recovery time superior to the four-hour SLA provided by its previous system.

CHALLENGES

• Replicating business data to a cluster archive.
• Replication from the financial product processing platform to a second hot standby disaster recovery site (both on Cloudera clusters).
• Replication of raw data from the compliance dashboard, which receives 10 million messages a day

SOLUTION

IBM Big Replicate, powered by WANdisco LiveData Platform, replicates multiple monthly batches of business data to the archive cluster, and raw data from the compliance dashboard to secondary clusters in micro-batches.

ENVIRONMENT, TECHNOLOGY, AND TOOLS

• Apache HIVE
• IBM Big Replicate
• Cloudera
• GTI
• HDFS
• LiveHive
• LiveSentry

CAPABILITIES INTRODUCED

Continuous, real-time data replication for high availability and near-zero RPO and RTO disaster recovery.

BENEFITS & OUTCOMES

• Achieves an RPO and RTO below two hours – a significant improvement on the four-hour SLA of its previous system.
• Offers real-time replication of data between environments, enabling failover between production and disaster recovery environments (tested bi-annually).
• IBM Big Replicate enables replication between LiveHive and LiveSentry.
• Ensures consistent, available data throughout the business, with dependable disaster recovery to protect business-critical applications