Protecting critical core business operations and avoiding a disaster recovery effort

Challenge

ABN AMRO has an impressive history stretching back to 1824. Over time they have become a leading international bank, with 4,500 branches in 53 countries. They are dedicated to supporting their consumer and commercial customers. Achieving this means ensuring their IT systems and applications are fully available 24/7. ABN AMRO’s was challenged by:

• Exchange Server Failure –During an emergency disaster recovery restore, Exchange Server failed to initialize.
• Inconsistencies and issues in the backup system (server cluster) impacted the ability to quickly restore the mail system.
• Microsoft engineers and onsite technical staff were unable to troubleshoot the failure on their own.

Solution

ABN AMRO Bank Exchange Server Solution consisted of a three-party collaboration among the bank’s IT technicians, a Microsoft Support engineer, and TwoConnect, who deployed engineers on-site. Serving as the primary point-of-contact between all parties, TwoConnect engineers:

• Fully recovered the mail system and restored Exchange Server environment functionality.
• Reinstalled Exchange 5.5.
• Fully restored databases.
• Fully recovered mail system.
• Successfully validated solution to support failover on cluster servers under all conditions.

Results

Measured against the cost of reduced service levels if failure should occur again, the dollar value of the ABN AMRO Bank Exchange Disaster Recovery Solution is incalculable. The solution provided the following results:

• Protected core business operations against loss of service impacting employees and customers
• Improved service delivery by establishing a fail-safe disaster recovery plan
• Reduced cost of disaster recovery plan maintenance
• Lowered risk of data loss
• Improved overall reliability of system