Bank of New York 

 

Bank of New York Counts on Pervasive

"Pervasive's database replication technology and willingness to provide immediate support have been critical to our disaster recovery efforts following the World Trade Center tragedy in September."

Brian Swords
Vice President, Corporate Trust
Bank of New York

About The Bank of New York
The Bank of New York Company, Inc., one of the largest financial holding companies in the United States, provides a complete range of banking and other financial services to corporations and individuals worldwide. The Bank of New York, its principal subsidiary, was founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton and is the nation's oldest bank. Today, the Bank of New York Company boasts assets in excess of $77 billion. In addition to a large U. S. presence, the bank operates in 26 countries across the world.

Business Challenge
The Bank of New York is a leading provider of corporate trust services around the world. It administers a diverse portfolio of more than 75,000 bond issues representing more than $700 billion in outstanding securities. One client, a foreign government, selected the Bank of New York to be their fiscal agent. For this account, the bank provides services including:

• Security issuance
• Registration
• Processing of interest and principal payments

To implement these services, the bank uses the TRAN*STAR application from T S Partners, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. This is a client/server application powered by a Pervasive.SQL 2000i database. The database includes bond data like owner, contact address, interest history and tax status. Several hundred bank personnel use TRAN*STAR to perform trustee tasks with efficiency and accuracy.

In an effort to provide even higher levels of customer service, the bank decided to add Web access to the bond data. This allows approximately four hundred registered brokers to access bondholder portfolio information without having to contact bank personnel and outside of normal business hours.

Web Portal Solution
The Bank of New York chose to create a Web-facing portal for the application to solve this data-accessibility issue. The portal allows brokers to access bondholder data to view portfolio balances, interest payment history and tax information for their clients. The portal initially went online in August 2001. It is a J2EE application built using the BEA WebLogic application server running on dual Sun/Solaris machines.

For security and connectivity purposes, the bank's IT staff decided to host the portal at a third-party Internet co-location facility in New Jersey. This provides separation between the bank's TRAN*STAR application, which is in a highly secure bank facility, and the public Internet.

While separating the bank's internal transactional system from the Web portal makes security sense, it introduced a challenge for data freshness. Users demand up-to-date information in the portal. Since the transactional and portal systems were located in different states and on different networks, simply pointing the portal to the transactional system's Pervasive.SQL 2000i database was not possible. Thus, the bank installed a Pervasive.SQL 2000i database at the co-location facility to power the portal application. In order to ensure portal users see fresh data, the Pervasive DataExchange database replication technology is used. This continually synchronizes the two databases over a leased T1 line. According to Brian Swords, Vice President of Corporate Trust, Bank of New York, "DataExchange reliably synchronizes our two Pervasive databases".

Disaster Strikes
The Bank of New York's primary operations and data center is at 101 Barclay Street in downtown Manhattan. The building suffered damage from the September 11, 2001, collapse of 7 World Trade Center, which was across the street. In the aftermath of the disaster, the building was evacuated and lacked power and connectivity. Bank employees were dispersed to rented office space within the New York area. They did not return until July 2002.

During the time of displacement, business had to continue. The bank had the advantage of having a documented disaster recovery plan. Immediately after the disaster, they relocated mainframe data processing to a previously established contingency site. As a departmental application, however, TRAN*STAR was not among those moved. Instead, they relied on a department-level recovery process.

The bank had a tape backup of the TRAN*STAR application at an offsite location, so they were able to quickly restore the application's code. As with any periodic tape backup, the transactional data from the database was not up-to-date. Further, due to the status of the building, bank personnel could not access the server to retrieve the most recent data. Thus, there was no accessible copy of the most recent database data.

Fortunately, Pervasive DataExchange continually synchronized the portal database with the master database. Thus, the Pervasive.SQL 2000i database powering the Web portal contained an up-to-date copy of the transactional data. Further, since this was at the offsite co-location facility, the data was accessible. To complete their restoration process, bank personnel simply shut down the portal database, copied the database files to the restoration location and reactivated both systems. This resulted in successful recovery of the transactional data and minimized disruption to the Bank's customers.

Bottom Line
There are three keys to recovering a computer application after a disaster: preparation, restorable code and restorable data. The Bank of New York had prepared for a disaster and created offsite code archives as tape backups. Through leveraging Pervasive DataExchange, they were able to recover the transaction data as well, completing the recovery process. This led Brian Swords, Vice President of Corporate Trust, Bank of New York to say "Pervasive's database replication technology and willingness to provide immediate support have been critical to our disaster recovery efforts following the World Trade Center tragedy in September."

About Pervasive Software®
Pervasive Software is a leading global data-management company powering the success of application developers by providing solutions that deliver the industry's best combination of performance, reliability and low administration costs. Pervasive's strength is evidenced by the size and diversity of its customer base, serving tens of thousands of customers with hundreds of thousands of end-users in nearly every vertical market around the world. Founded in 1994, Pervasive sells its products into more than 150 countries and is based in Austin, Texas, with offices in Europe.

For more information
To learn more about Pervasive Software and our solutions, please visit www.pervasive.com. To reach the North American sales office, call 1.800.287.4383, extension 2. For Latin, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand, call +1.512.231.6000. In Europe, for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, call +800.12.12.34.34. For any other European, Middle Eastern, African or Asian countries (excluding Japan), call +32.70.23.37.61. For Japan, please call +81.3.3293.5300, or visit www.pervasive.co.jp.