“Banking is a 24-by-7 business now. We can’t afford outages. Our SQL Server implementation with AlwaysOn puts us on the road to improving the quality of everything we have.”

Brent McCracken, Technical Lead for Database Operations, Kiwibank

Kiwibank was using an out-of-date disaster recovery method to ensure the availability of its mission-critical applications to its customers, both internal and external. The bank saw reliability and performance gains through a rapid implementation of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 AlwaysOn and set a path for a high-availability solution to meet its future needs.

Business NeedsFounded in 2001, Kiwibank is wholly owned by New Zealand Post, which in turn is owned by the New Zealand government. Kiwibank is popular for its business and personal retail banking offerings, including a variety of online services. The bank’s growth has been significant over its 13 years of operation. It now serves more than 20 percent of New Zealand’s population.

Kiwibank is headquartered in the New Zealand capital city of Wellington, located right on a fault line on the geologically notorious “Ring of Fire” around the Pacific Ocean, where volcanic and seismic activity is ongoing. For this reason, as a first step in improving its disaster recovery profile, the bank relocated its primary data center

to Auckland, 400 miles away. This distance provided a decreased likelihood of outages from natural disasters, but introduced challenges for the company’s ability to maintain high availability of its day-to-day services. Its disaster recovery solution—based on Failover Clustering, a feature of the Windows Server operating system—provided automated failover for operating systems but not for databases. In addition, the 30-second latency requirement (the time required to fail over from one location to the other) exceeded the .NET timeout of many of its applications.

To retain the availability of its critical applications and enhance overall performance, Kiwibank IT staff wanted a low-latency scenario that would also

Customer: KiwibankWebsite: www.kiwibank.co.nzCustomer Size: 1,000+ employeesCountry or Region: New ZealandIndustry: Financial services—Retail banking

Customer ProfileKiwibank is a New Zealand–owned retail bank with more than 250 branches. The bank has more than 1,000 employees and serves 850,000 customers through branches, online services, and a nationwide ATM network.

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2012 R2 Core

Edition− Microsoft SQL Server 2014

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New Zealand Bank Upgrades Its Disaster Recovery Solution to Achieve 99.9999 Percent System Uptime

reduce the frequency of scheduled maintenance procedures such as software patching. With this goal in mind, the bank investigated a new approach to its high availability and business continuity design.

SolutionUpgrading the Kiwibank failover solution using the existing technologies posed more of a challenge than its IT group felt was feasible. Says Brent McCracken, Technical Lead of Database Operations at Kiwibank, “My preference was to migrate off the old solution completely.”

Continuing its tradition of using Microsoft server products, Kiwibank replaced its existing failover environment with Microsoft SQL Server 2014 software in three nodes: two in the Auckland data center and the third in Wellington. A combination of synchronous and asynchronous connectivity between the nodes provides automatic failover in the event that one of the nodes goes offline. The solution uses a “listener” as a single point of connection for applications, simplifying the failover process by using one DNS address for application requests rather than routing to multiple addresses.

The resulting automatic failover capabilities eclipse what the bank had been able to achieve with its previous scenario. Looking back, Kiwibank IT is glad it chose to start from scratch.

In addition to SQL Server, each node also runs Server Core, a stripped-down Windows Server installation variant that reduces downtime vulnerability by having fewer components. In the near future, Kiwibank will also implement the in-memory tables feature of SQL Server to further enhance application performance.

BenefitsBy improving application reliability and performance, rolling out quickly, simplifying the server model, and enabling in-memory tables, the SQL Server solution has been a success for both the business and IT sides of Kiwibank. “Banking is a 24-by-7 business now. We can’t afford outages. Our SQL Server implementation with AlwaysOn puts us on the road to improving the quality of everything we have,” McCracken says.

Improved Reliability and PerformanceBy setting up a geographically dispersed cluster, Kiwibank was able to provide better availability for its online banking applications. Failover time is down from 30 seconds to about 5 seconds—well within the application timeout parameters—and overall system uptime is now between 99.999 and 99.9999 percent. Average times for authentication have been cut by 50 percent. The single point of access provides automated failover for older applications that formerly relied on manual DNS failover.

“The business channel we are serving with this solution depends on round-the-clock customer access to our technology,” McCracken says. “This solution gives us the uptime our customers expect.”

Rapid ImplementationKiwibank implemented its solution with a minimum of effort or delays. Despite having to accommodate the necessary upgrade requirements from its previous versions of SQL Server, the project lasted only three months from the time Kiwibank IT staff began working on it in September 2013 until it rolled out the solution in December 2013.

Because Kiwibank IT already used SQL Server and other Microsoft products extensively, little training was needed to get the solution underway. “We deployed a number of builds along the way,” McCracken says. “Microsoft was releasing successive versions as it got ready for RTM, and we upgraded or reinstalled each time as needed.”

The initial deployment supports the bank’s mission-critical online banking applications. By the end of 2014, the bank plans to migrate the remainder of its line-of-business applications to the new solution.

Stripped-Down Server ComputingWith the Server Core option installed on all three nodes using SQL Server 2014 AlwaysOn, Kiwibank has sheltered its new solution from specific vulnerabilities it previously considered to be availability risks. “With Server Core, you have fewer components installed, which means you don’t have nearly as many security patches

that you need to apply,” McCracken explains. “By not having to patch the servers, we avoid going through the reboot cycles that take the servers offline one at a time.”

In addition to having fewer patching requirements, Server Core reduces the attack surface for security threats and “locks down” the servers from unwanted or accidental configuration changes by database administrators.

Memory-Optimized Table CapabilityThe online transaction processing (OLTP) capability introduced with SQL Server 2014 will provide Kiwibank with additional benefits for accelerating the authentication processes of its applications. Currently, the bank is updating the applications to use this new feature, which will ensure data tables can fit entirely within memory on each server. This design enhances server data processing speed by freeing up other processes.

McCracken says the first application to take advantage of In-Memory OLTP is scheduled to go online with the new high-availability solution later this year, with others to follow.

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Document published May 2014