Bank of Montreal

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Softek TDMF Enables Migration During Production for Bank of Montreal

The Business Need

As the credit and debit card markets have exploded over the past decade, Bank of Montreal has built a well-earned reputation as a leading provider of processing support for thousands of merchants across North America. These include retailers, restaurants and hospitality businesses, a growing cadre of Internet-based commerce and entertainment customers such as 24-hour casinos. Point-of-sale card swipes by these bank customers tally in the millions a day.

"Today's card merchant needs 24/7 network availability with no exceptions," explained Afzal "Shaff" Shaffeeullah, Technical Specialist, Software Services Department, in the Bank of Montreal's Networks & Systems Division. Bank of Montreal's ability to offer full network uptime has been key to helping the company retain and grow POS market share. "Merchants don't have the luxury of their network being down, even for an instant," Shaff said.

Late in 1999, with this e-commerce environment peaking, Bank of Montreal's management handed down its own objective: All departments must deliver maximum availability. On the storage side, this meant virtually no downtime for maintenance or technology refresh. "We were now facing both internal and external mandates for data processing," Shaff said.

Our team had projected an 18-hour outage to move data, perform technical upgrades and reconfigure storage facilities to complete the job," said Ron Rose, Manager, Software Services Department. "There was no way we could consider an outage of that magnitude."

The Solution

Enter Fujitsu Softek and its Softek TDMF, Mainframe Edition solution. Softek TDMF could provide Bank of Montreal fully secure and immediate data migration, regardless of number of volumes or time-of-day restrictions. Fujitsu Softek has long been a strategic IT partner with Bank of Montreal, having helped the Bank adopt a data warehousing solution to support data mining and targeted marketing programs. Bank of Montreal felt the data migration project should involve a known entity and would minimize the research curve and technology risk. "Fujitsu Softek helped us do the due diligence, based on our corporate objectives and desired outcome," Shaff said. "We knew they were part of the team."

During the Softek TDMF demo, Bank of Montreal noted how the solution worked independent of vendors' sub-systems. "Any other vendor we looked at --hardware or software-- all had proprietary limitations. They were tied to their own technology and gave us only partial support," Rose said. Softek TDMF worked across vendors, platforms, and applications. "And we didn't need to reconfigure hardware or cabling," Rose said. "With other vendors, you have rework to do, which increases the chance for outages or disruption."

The Results

The first migration involved about 200-plus 3390-type volumes. Once the Bank realized how quickly and easily it could happen, they took their time and did the job over a four-week period. Since then, the Bank has moved another 200 volumes in batches of three or four at a time.

All this occurred without additional staff or training. Softek TDMF is so simple to use, the migration team was able to move the first few test volumes by just referencing the sample. "A huge benefit," Rose said, "has been that Softek TDMF requires no overtime or night or weekend work. Standard functionality was very important to us. We need to do migrations during the day with regular staff."

Performance and scalability were further attractions. Since the initial migration, the Bank continues to use Softek TDMF to move data volumes on an as-needed basis. The software processes multiple jobs at once-- as many jobs as the Bank's CPUs can handle.

Bank of Montreal has relayed the benefits of Softek TDMF on to its merchant customers. "It has been a definite competitive advantage for us-- and there's a lot of competition out there," Rose said. "To be able to assure uptime, with no degradation, gets us noticed. We've been satisfied from day one."

Softek TDMF Benefits

• Fast Copy option - Speeds migrations, decreases costs
• Pacing options - Enables continued migration during heavy production
• Offline Volume Access (OVA) - Eliminates need for second OS
• Auto-operations interface - Saves time, increases productivity
• Perpetual Point-in-Time copy - Faster PIT migrations, only make complete copy of data one time, can be used in conjunction with OVA