Republic Bancorp Inc., the parent company of Republic Bank, isn't the largest bank-holding company in Michigan. It's the third largest in that state and the 85th largest in the United States. Republic Bank itself holds about $4.5 billion for its 250,000 clients in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. With 104 branch offices and 108 automated teller machines, the regional bank is a perfect candidate for an integrated midrange system like the AS/400. And, indeed, Republic Bank relies heavily on its AS/400 technology, and has for years.

Republic Bank runs the Silverlake suite of banking software from Jack Henry & Associates, a Missouri-based company that has carved a comfortable niche for itself as a single-source provider of hardware, software, and services for midsize financial institutions.

Recently, Republic Bank expanded its core Silverlake application with a module that allows customers to access their accounts over the Internet. The bank uses another Jack Henry module that allows customers to access account information over the telephone, and another one for ATM access. Ideally, all three of these modules would permit customers to access their accounts at any time of day, on any day of the week. However, that was not the case.

Republic Bank would bring its AS/400 application offline once a month for about five hours to perform a full system save, said Rich Roty, CIO of Republic Bank. The server would also be brought down periodically to perform any database reorganizations or hardware or software upgrades that required a reboot or IPL, he said.

Even though Republic Bank tried its best to keep the maintenance-induced downtime confined to off-hours of the weekend, there was still the potential of upsetting customers who liked to withdraw their money at any hour of the day. "If you were coming home at night and the ATM was down, you wouldn't have a very good opinion of the bank," Roty said. "It was always a concern."

Besides upsetting customers, the downtime proved an inconvenience for Roty and his staff, who would forgo five hours of sleep on weekends to perform the saves. The company needed a way to keep the Silverlake applications online during regular maintenance sessions, so they began researching high availability solutions that could take them there.

Roty and his system administrator, Bob Galloway, attended a high availability seminar put on by IBM. All three of IBM's high availability Business Partners--Lakeview, DataMirror, and Vision Solutions--presented at the seminar. But when it came time to select a high availability vendor, Republic Bank went with its single-source provider, Jack Henry, which exclusively resells Lakeview's products. "I think we would have picked Lakeview anyway," Roty said. "They have a large customer base and a good track record."

The installation of Jack Henry's ClusterProven version of Silverlake and Lakeview's MIMIX high availability software was handled by those two vendors and began this February. It was operational by March but took another three months of tinkering before Roty and Galloway got the program to perform exactly the way they wanted it to. Despite the road bumps, it was a very respectable deployment schedule, especially considering that Republic Bank was doing something that no OS/400 shop had ever done before: Implementing a ClusterProven application.

IBM uses its ClusterProven brand to designate eServer applications that have proven their ability to work in a clustered environment. Clustering is the latest in iSeries high availability technology. It goes beyond the data replication and failover technology that companies like Lakeview have sold for high availability environments and allows multiple AS/400s or iSeries to share workloads at the same time. In the event that one of the clustered AS/400s goes down (or is brought down for regular maintenance), the other iSeries box, or boxes, automatically picks up the workload, resulting in a minimum of downtime. Under ideal circumstances, a clustered application can switch over to the backup server within 10 minutes, as opposed to potentially hours with previous replication technologies.

"Clustering supplies a much more standardized way of deploying the high availability solution," said Glenn Van Benschoten, Lakeview's high availability solution architect. "It's a more robust, repeatable, definable, deployable solution."

Van Benschoten said another benefit of clustering in an OS/400 is the "heartbeat monitoring," or the monitor that detects when an application isn't behaving correctly and may crash, requiring a switch-over to prevent extended downtime. OS/400 has its own heartbeat monitor, which is more reliable and gives fewer false positives than the heartbeat monitors supplied by the High Availability Business Partners, he said.

Up until about a year ago, there were no iSeries applications that had achieved ClusterProven status. Today, there are about 10 ClusterProven applications for the iSeries, just about all of them banking applications, and many of them are cluster-enabled through Lakeview's FastPath service. Lakeview offers its own ClusterReady brand, but to achieve the higher ClusterProven status, the application must be able to automatically pick up where the user's session left off, without dumping the user back at the sign-on screen.

Jack Henry was not the first iSeries software vendor to attain ClusterProven status for its application. Misys International Banking Systems (formerly known as Midas-Kapiti) was. But Jack Henry is the first vendor to actually have its ClusterProven application installed, along with the MIMIX clustering management software from Lakeview, in a live site. (Oriental Trading Company, another Lakeview customer, was the first customer to go live with clustering, but it was for home-grown applications; there was no need to submit to ClusterProven testing.) Today, there are three live installations of ClusterProven applications (including Republic Bank), two using Lakeview technology and the other using software from DataMirror.

Today, Republic Bank uses its clustering capabilities at least once a month. When the bank performs full-system saves on its product machine, a two- way i820, the bank's second machine, a single-processor i820, takes over the processing workload. The switch-overs take between 12 and 15 minutes, Roty said.

The one hiccup that Republic Bank encountered during the installation had to do with perfecting the switch-over. Roty said it took about three months of Saturday afternoons at the office to get the timing between the bank's job scheduling and message queue monitoring software, from Help/Systems, to work correctly with the clustering setup. Help/Systems has since attained ClusterProven status for its applications, but Roty doesn't see any reason to install it now that he's got the system working the way he wants.

"Now that we have worked out the bumps, it's as close as a push of a button," Roty said. "To get to high availability, you have to experience a little low availability. [But] right now, we're pretty happy."

Galloway, who had participated in a Lakeview installation with a previous company, echoed Roty's sentiments. "It wasn't any worse than what I expected it to be," he said. "I think it made the switching part a lot faster. The way it used to work, it took 45 minutes."

In addition to sheltering Republic Bank's customers from the effects of server maintenance, the clustering technology shelters the bank from the potential loss of business as a result of disasters. Previously, Republic Bank had relied on Jack Henry to provide servers at hot sites in the event of a disaster, but now the bank is fully capable of standing on its own two feet. And that's something you can bank on.

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