IBM Case Study Sample

BMO’s Operational Resiliency Program
The original backup and disaster recovery (DR) site was located less than 10 km from the primary data center, an inadequate distance to be considered “out-of-region.” To solve this problem, BMO set up a new site -- one that was 100 km away. This effort, part of BMO’s Operational Resiliency Program (ORP), had several important goals: to increase the distance between the primary and backup sites, to achieve a recovery point objective of zero, to establish two control points for operations, and to enable system and workload restoration within a two-hour timeframe.

IBM helped supply BMO with the technologies necessary to achieve these resiliency goals and supported the project throughout the implementation. Says Sanderson, “We have a very strong IBM team locally that’s been involved in the project. We’ve had them engaged all the way through.”

Early adopters of STP
Critical to the success of the new data center was the ability to synchronize transactions between the Bank’s primary and backup servers -- 10 IBM System z mainframes in all. Peer-to-peer remote copy (PPRC) was used to achieve data mirroring between sites, effectively synchronizing transactional data between the servers. Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS), a multi-site end-to-end application availability solution, was used to automate the recovery process and manage the PPRC environment.