To achieve high-availability services for its processing clients, Chip Card, member of Payten, has successfully implemented the so-called Active-Active Authentication System, which ensures the parallel work of two processing locations that are identical concerning hardware and software, yet physically independent of each other.
The expected growth of business operations, processing of transactions made by new clients, and the organic growth of the existing ones as well, have all conditioned the need for the extension of capacities. In compliance with the market trends and requirements, an analysis has been carried out leading to a decision to shift from the standard Active-Passive Solution to the high-availability solution where both processing websites work at the same time, and if a problem occurs in one of the locations, the other location immediately starts processing the overall traffic.
The new solution is characterized by two physically independent locations – one location is the Chip Card Center, whereas the other is the SBB Telepark, both having the identical base and applicative servers connected by means of a high-capacity link and performing synchronization in real time. This solution also implies the existence of redundant links to all the external institutions (card schemes and users), where, in case the primary one stops working, a shift to the Back-up linking is automatically performed.
The volume of the activities carried out in this project has been substantial and all-inclusive since the complete network equipment has been improved along with the storage equipment, the migration from the Solaris Platform to the Linux Platform, the migration from the Oracle 12 Base to the Oracle 19 Base, the migration to the Exadata System, creation of the Cloud Test System, the operations migration to the new Vmware Platform, simultaneously providing business operation continuity.
Implementation of the New Active-Active SW Solution Project lasted for one year, with the active participation of the team of the company whose software Chip Card has been using. During the Project, many necessary testing sessions, as well as system adjustments, were performed.
A great number of Chip Card’s employees have taken part in the implementation of the Project, each one of them having individually been an important link in the chain of project activities, which has finally resulted in a big, joint step forward, enabling Chip Card to raise its standards in the payment transactions processing domain.
The benefits of the new solution for Chip Card include:
· ensuring support to the planned growth of the company in years to come;
· a possibility to offer high availability to clients, which is an enormous comparative advantage;
· achieving almost 100% system availability
· the elimination of planned cessations in the system improvement and
· the preparation for the semiannual mandates of the card organizations.
Additionally, planned improvements in the technical sense include:
• the migration to the Linux Platform that ensures a considerably broader knowledge base is easier to maintain and has a shorter time for the implementation of new functionalities, given the fact that it is a Tieto-recommended platform;
• the use of the Oracle Exadata base servers that substantially increase the stability, speed of work, scalability, and capacity of the storage space and the data processing space;
• the introduction of the Cloud Service for testing and the UAT environment that substantially decreases the costs of infrastructure and the Oracle licenses in relation to the local installation.