Russian Bank Adopts MIMIX for i5/OS

Published: February 6, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Alfa-Bank, one of Russia's largest privately owned banks, has implemented Lakeview Technology's MIMIX ha1 for i5/OS software to protect itself from both planned and unplanned outages, the software company announced recently.

Alpha-Bank operates 121 branches and subsidiary banks across Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the Netherlands, and maintains assets of $9.8 billion. The bank is progressive, in that it's one of a handful of Russian banks to adopt Western accounting standards. For the past three years, it's also headed the list of the "best IT banks in Russia," an annual survey conducted by an independent Russian research group.

However, despite its advanced core processing system from Misys running on iSeries hardware, the bank was not immune to downtime. The nightly "end of day" procedures posed a particular problem, as they required Alpha-Bank to shut down its ATMs and Internet banking solutions as backups and other maintenance was performed. Hardware failures also contributed to the occasional unexpected outage.

The bank began looking for high availability software to help it solve these problems. "Alfa-Bank knew that to evolve and innovate at the forefront of technology, it required protecting their IT assets," says Alexander Trekin, the Lakeview consultant who assisted Alpha-Bank with the implementation. "They looked at a full spectrum of information availability solutions on various platforms, chose MIMIX ha1 high availability software from Lakeview Technology, and implemented in partnership with IBM."

Alpha-Bank's CIO, Sergei Mednov, provided this insight into the decision. "Our IT team found that MIMIX is easily implemented, has a proven integration with our chosen banking environment and is easy to manage day to day," he said. "Lakeview and IBM are highly respected, especially within the banking industry, which is why we ultimately selected this leading combination."

Today, iSeries servers at either of Alpha-Bank's data center--one of which is equipped with System i model 595--can handle the transaction load while maintenance is performed on the other.

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