The Need
African Baking Corporation Limited (ABC Bank) needed to engage the services of a competent solution provider to provide system and database support services under a Service Level Agreement (SLA) framework. ABC Bank then engaged Cutting Edge Technologies Limited to provide it with these support services.
What Cutting Edge Technologies Limited has done for ABC Bank
We have been providing the bank with the required support services, which have enabled the bank to stabilize the operations of its databases and the systems which host them. A unique case in point was a situation that was escalated to us by the bank, in which the bank’s senior database administrator (DBA) reported that the core banking database would frequently get to a point where it would be unable to cope with the data processing workload during peak times, even though such resources as memory and processors at the Operating System level were not getting exhausted.
We undertook a performance health check on the database, its compute platform, storage sub-system and the interconnecting network. Individual observations at the database in isolation did not yield very helpful information. However, when we performed a holistic examination of the database platform using our “application-to-disk” strategy, we identified the storage I/O configuration as the cause of the bottleneck, since the I/O sub-system was maxing out on its capacity. We therefore studied the hardware configuration of the database platform and identified the remedy required, which fixed the database performance issues that was preventing the core banking system to successfully complete its end-of-day batch processes.
After fixing the issue, we undertook a skill transfer to the bank’s database and system administration team to enable them identify “application-to0-disk” issues that could potentially affect their applications, and mitigative measures required to avert similar performance issues on the bank’s applications. Thank bank consequently retained our services as part of its strategy to keep its ICT platform well maintained and managed.
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