The Challenge
A leading global financial institution needed to evolve from traditional disaster recovery testing to a repeatable operational capability: continuously rotating production processing between primary and secondary data centers.
Supporting a complex mainframe environment under strict regulatory mandates, the bank faced key technical and logistical challenges:
- Segmented Workload Failover: Shifting targeted groups of logical partitions (LPARs) supporting major workload segments rather than an all-or-nothing data center switch.
- Latency & Cross-System Dependencies: Operating mainframe workloads at the secondary site while maintaining low-latency communication with distributed applications at the primary site.
- Co-Lo Integration: Coordinating colocation data center buildouts, power, cabling, and vendor approvals directly into the migration schedule.
The bank engaged CPT Global to refine its strategy, mitigate risk, and accelerate delivery.
CPT Global's Actions
CPT deployed a 14-person team of mainframe, automation, and resilience specialists to work directly alongside the client's internal teams:
- Refined Playbooks & Strategy: Expanded failover/failback runbooks into a single operational source of truth across all in-scope applications.
- Automated Migrations & Health Checks: Engineered custom automation to accelerate execution time and built post-migration health-check scripts to validate system stability.
- Resolved Latency & Co-Lo Logistics: Mapped cross-system dependencies, conducted non-production latency simulations across sysplexes, and aligned colocation infrastructure requirements.
- Embedded Knowledge Transfer: Partnered closely with client staff to ensure long-term self-sufficiency and operational continuity.
Results
CPT transformed the institution's failover process from a periodic compliance exercise into a continuous, operationalized capability:
- Proven Live Outage Recovery: When an actual production outage occurred months after project completion, the bank successfully failed over and restored operations. Executive leadership credited CPT Global's framework as critical to the recovery.
- Scheduled Quarterly Rotations: Successfully transitioned to predictable production data center rotations every three months within required SLAs.
- Faster, Lower-Risk Execution: Automation significantly cut migration execution time and minimized manual intervention.
- Continuous Resiliency: Confirmed both sites can handle full production loads smoothly while leaving a scalable foundation for ongoing audit and operational needs.
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