The State of Espírito Santo Bank invested R$ 14 million in the solution to ensure reliability to its operations

The approximately 800 thousand Banestes clients (State of Espírito Santo Bank) have a reason to feel at ease. The bank has invested approximately R$ 14 million in the creation of a contingency site. The project, initiated in 2005, contemplated the installation of a mainframe (a Sun machine intended for bank automation), 40 servers, redundant no-breaks, a group of motor-generators and the entire contingency telecom infrastructure supported by distinct operators.

The institution processes approximately 500 thousand accounts a day, causing the flow of one million entries every 24 hours. Paulo Cezar Lorenção, IT director of Banestes, commented that an interruption in the equipment in 2005 accelerated the decision. Until then, the bank depended on a single park to run critical processes. The backups were on security tapes stored in a backup site and a copy of the data stored at another geographic point.

The IT integrator, CIMCORP, designed the architecture of the contingency park infrastructure in a project that counted on the collaboration of Unisys consultants and Banestes professionals in the area of technology. The first phase contemplated more critical services. Lorenção emphasizes that the prioritization itself of the phases required special attention so as not to anticipate less important services for the bank’s operations. Thus, the older systems with heavier processing, such as the case of those running on the mainframe, were the first to go through a contingency process.

The contingency site is 5 km from the main site in order to avoid any type of problem. The "mirror" practically runs the entire time in standby mode. According to Lorenção, the exception is the storage, which replicates everything that occurs in the main structure.

The IT designed a manual script to make the backup run, in case all other possibilities fail. "Many people don’t realize that when a catastrophe occurs, they can be affected ", says the director. The description of a step-by-step overcomes this need. "Anyone who knows something about IT would startup the site on the other side through manual procedures ", emphasizes the executive, defining the limit of four hours as sufficient time to completely startup the contingency.

In its current stage, 90% of the bank’s services are mirrored. "The other 10% are less critical operations that must be placed in contingency with the expansion of the project ", he explains, pointing out that the next phase will contemplate these applications. "The clients do not have to worry about their data disappearing ", guarantees Lorenção, because with the backup park, Banestes operates in three layers of security, because the tapes and the backup site have not been abandoned.