See also:

A message from Alan Hutton, president of FundSERV: Work on ESG v18 is well underway

FundSERV and Fidelity: Working together to advance the investment fund industry

FundSERV appoints new CFO and VP corporate services

From quality assurance to customer relations

Expanding tech support department into second site

Are you satisfied with FundSERV's service? Satisfaction survey results are in!

FundSERV moving to 5970 audit standard

FundSERV Network Performance

All articles

It almost goes without saying that FundSERV pays particular attention to how its data is managed, stored and in the rare event of a service interruption, retrieved. Now, after almost a year and a significant investment in time and resources, the Company is about to move to the next level in terms of ensuring data reliability.

Under the direction of Alex von Tiesenhausen, director of networking and Huy Huynh, director of systems, the FundSERV IT team has been laying the groundwork for a storage area network, or SAN. A SAN has a number of benefits over other methods of data storage and now that FundSERV has two operational data centres, these benefits can be realized.

"With a SAN, we can provide real-time mirroring of data," says von Tiesenhausen. "This means data is being backed up simultaneously in two different locations: our downtown office and our backup facility. In the event of an interruption or outage at one location we can immediately switch to the other with no loss of data and minimal loss of time."

Termed a "hot" backup solution, a SAN is a considerable improvement over FundSERV's earlier methods of data storage, which involved backing data up to tape and then removing those tapes to a secure third-party location. While effective and commonly used by many similarly sized companies, tape backups require time to reinstall in the event of an outage. For FundSERV and its customers, time is critical. A SAN reduces that recovery time from hours to minutes.

"A second benefit of our SAN is that we can consolidate data storage," notes Huynh. "Previously, we were using direct attached storage technology, which meant that each server in our server farm had its own storage devices. As a result, we had islands of storage with large amounts of unused space," explains Huynh. "The SAN allows us to connect our storage array to the network and provide shared storage for all applications. This makes storage easier to manage and, as Alex mentioned, we can mirror our data between two locations to further mitigate risk."

A third benefit is improved reliability during recovery testing. FundSERV conducts tests of its disaster recovery plan throughout the year and recently, this has involved "failing-over" to FundSERV's backup facility. If an outage occurred during testing, there were limited ways to switch back to the Toronto facility. With the SAN, this is no longer an issue as the sites are inter-connected and can switch easily back and forth.

"I'm pleased with our progress to date on this key project," says Amir Jafri, vice president of technology. "Once in place, we will have taken significant strides from disaster recovery to true business continuity."

With final testing well underway, the SAN technology is scheduled for production in the fall of 2006.

Table of Contents