Customer Story
CU*Answers
CU*Answers chose Assure iTERA HA for cost-effective high availability
If you supply software as a service (SaaS) to financial services organizations that operate around the clock, as CU*Answers does, you need to be certain that your applications are available. Always. And because its customers are also it’s owners, CU*Answers has an added incentive to provide solutions that keep the software that customers run in-house available without exception as well.
Credit union members use their debit and credit cards, access ATMs and do online banking at all hours. And credit union systems must always be available to fulfill these needs, without excuses.
CU*Answers provides software applications and services to 190 credit unions that serve a total of almost 1.5-million members. It provides applications to most customer-owners using a SaaS model, while other credit unions run the software on their own systems. Regardless of the delivery model, 24×7 high availability (HA) is essential.
Operating as a cooperative, CU*Answers’ customers are also its owners, which heightens customers’ scrutiny of its operations. What’s more, in the financial services industry, HA isn’t just good business policy. It’s mission critical. Stringent regulations require that all financial institutions aggressively protect their business continuity.
Hardware, software and power supplies don’t always respect this need for availability. CU*Answers and its customer/owners use one of the most reliable systems on the market, IBM Power Systems running IBM i, but disasters can still happen. And, even when everything runs perfectly, hardware and software upgrades and maintenance are occasionally necessary to support evolving and growing demands. Nonetheless, CU*Answers must ensure that its applications are available no matter what.
CU*Answers has used Assure iTERA HA to help guarantee data and application availability for 10 years. This HA solution replicates data and applications from a primary server in Grand Rapids, Michigan to a backup server in Muskegon, Michigan. CU*Answers also hosts backup servers for nearly all many of its the customerowners that deploy core applications in their own production data center. In this case as well, Assure iTERA HA drives the replication between the primary and backup servers.
