Seeing opportunities for change and improvement, ANZ embarked on a transformation of its mainframe infrastructure environment starting with its z13® upgrade in 2015. The regulatory landscape was growing increasingly stringent, with increased requirements expected on availability requirements.
“We wanted to make sure that as a bank we were well placed to exceed requirements into the future,” Squires says. “It was an opportunity to streamline, simplify and add resilience to our recovery processes and add much more functionality and options to the whole process at the same time.”
As part of the transformation, the ANZ Enterprise Compute team sought to take advantage of the newest IBM System Storage DS8000® series and other innovative IBM technologies. It learned about some of these advancements through participation in the IBM Systems Early Program, which gives the bank access to beta version IBM offerings and IBM developers who can assist with implementation.
Squires and the team redesigned the recovery systems and processes so that the bank no longer maintains primary and DR sites. Instead, it has one primary site and one alternate site, each with two IBM zSystems servers. All four server systems, including central storage, network connections, FICON and encryption cards, are identically configured. In the event of a disaster, any of the four servers can run the bank’s core systems, helping ensure inter-site and intra-site recovery without impact to the business.
“We are driving what in my opinion are industry-leading processes by having everything mirrored,” Squires says.
Other IBM technologies were added in 2016 to enable the transformation. These included the IBM zSystems disk channel subsystem function, which significantly simplifies storage configuration by allowing for a single address range across both sites. In addition, the HyperSwap® (PDF) function, part of the IBM z/OS® operating system, accelerates multi-target storage swaps without requiring outages, enabling storage to be mirrored across and within sites. Furthermore in 2018, ANZ requested additional streamline features for IBM Copy Services Manager technology on DS8000 systems which orchestrates data replication and failover and failback mechanisms between the different sites.
In 2020, ANZ was consulted in the early design phase for one of the most recently developed IBM technologies, the IBM Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency solution. This is a new IBM z16™ offering that will further enhance ANZ mainframe environment processing capacity flexibility between primary and alternate data centers. It is designed to provide increased flexibility and control for organizations that want to shift product capacity between different sites for up to one year. It also features automation based on IBM Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex® (GDPS®) technology.
ANZ is now better prepared to respond to expected and unexpected outages, which will help reduce business risk. In the event of an outage at the primary site, the bank can quickly transfer mission-critical functions’ server and storage capacity within and across sites, a capability that is designed for minimal or no loss of operational continuity. ANZ can choose whichever option works best based on specific threats or situations and can also maintain continuity until primary site functions are restored.
The integration of these capabilities is providing a significant degree of operational resilience and continuity confidence for bank executives. “With all this IBM technology, and our system design, we have multiple recovery options available to us,” Squires says.