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China Minsheng Banking Corp., Ltd. Enhances Service Continuity with IBM's Advanced Database Clustering Technology
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Construction Management
- Time Sensitive Networking
Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
China Minsheng Banking Corp., Ltd. (CMBC), one of China's leading retail banks, was faced with the challenge of meeting rising customer expectations for 24/7 banking services while keeping costs under control. In an increasingly 24/7 world, customers expect online and telephone banking services to be available whenever they need them. Banks that fail to provide seamless customer service risk losing market share to competitors. CMBC wanted to outperform its competitors by ensuring that its business-critical systems were online and available to customers at all times. Specifically, CMBC wanted to ensure non-stop availability of the mission-critical system it relies on to calculate the fees it charges for each transaction, as any delays or interruptions could have far-reaching consequences for customer satisfaction and the bank's reputation. The system supports billing and accumulation for CMBC's front-office operations, arrearage and inquiry statistics for the back office, and periodical and protocol billing for the entire bank, making 2.5 million calculations each day.
About The Customer
China Minsheng Banking Corp., Ltd. (CMBC) is one of China's leading retail banks, focusing on small and medium enterprises and on high-end retail customers. It is the first bank in China to be primarily owned by non-government enterprises. CMBC manages total assets of CNY 3.2 trillion, and operates 33 branches and more than 700 banking outlets. The bank is committed to meeting rising customer expectations for 24/7 banking services while keeping costs under control. It aims to outperform its competitors by ensuring that its business-critical systems are online and available to customers at all times.
The Solution
CMBC chose to deploy a geographically displaced IBM® DB2® pureScale® cluster (GDPC) to support its fee-per-transaction system. The cluster runs on IBM Power® 750 Express servers located at two sites. The pureScale technology enables simultaneous read and write operations to both sites, and can achieve near-instant failover in the event of a disaster. By writing data to both servers simultaneously, the solution ensures that the databases at both sites are almost completely synchronized at all times, despite the 60 kilometer distance between them. This approach also maximizes the utilization of resources: instead of having a standby server that is idle most of the time, both of the servers in the cluster are constantly available to support the bank's business processes. IBM DB2 pureScale is transparent to applications, helping CMBC to rapidly get started with the solution. The ability to add cluster members and resources as desired enables the bank to scale up the platform horizontally as well as vertically, helping to remove barriers to expansion.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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