Bellwether Community Credit Union
Credit Union Case Study
Bellwether Community Credit Union is a financial institution with 3 branches, headquartered in Manchester, NH, serving over 28,000 members with more than $408 million in assets. Bellwether was chartered in 1921 by employees of Bell Telephone and now serves members throughout the community.
Issue
One of the credit union’s core system disk drives failed. While the system was attempting to rebuild, drive two failed causing the entire system to crash. The initial failure caused a 10 minute gap in the forward log. Not only was the core system down, the forward log was unusable. The credit union contacted their hardware support and after attempts to recover the system, it was mutually agreed upon to contact IMS and declare a disaster.
Solutions
The credit union contacted IMS and left a message on the emergency hotline at approximately 2:00 a.m. PST. Within 20 minutes, an IMS disaster recovery engineer was in communication with credit union IT staff. The credit union explained the circumstances and IMS immediately began the process of recovering the core system at the IMS data center. The system was recovered within an hour, meeting the credit union’s 4 hour recovery time objective (RTO). However, there was still the issue of the unusable forward log file.
IMS contacted Marxmeier, the database vendor, and worked with them to write a custom program to reconstruct the forward log file. After approximately 11 hours from the time of declaration, the log file was re-constructed and posted. During this time, IMS engineers established communications between the credit union and the IMS data center and third-party vendor connectivity was validated. Once the log file posting was complete, the core system application was brought online.
Over the next 48 hours the credit union was able to work with their hardware support vendor to replace the drives on their system and bring it back up in an operational state. The credit union and IMS then coordinated a time after hours on day three to move them back over. A backup was performed on the IMS system, restored onto the credit union system and balanced. Communication with IMS and the main branch was brought down, routes were changed, and third-party vendor communications was reestablished. The credit union was back on their own system and was able to resume business as usual.
Once the credit union was back on their own system and everything settled down, a meeting was scheduled between IMS and credit union staff to recap the recovery, ensure everything was documented and discuss what could be improved upon in the future.
Location
Manchester, NH
Link
Visit Website
Services Utilized
Consulting
Core Programming
Disaster Recovery
Backup
Electronic Forms
What the Client is Saying
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“No credit union ever wants to declare a disaster. Having said that, because of our relationship with IMS there was no hesitation to put our operations in their hands. Their outstanding professional staff jumped into action immediately upon our call. Our I.T. staff here at Bellwether takes the service we deliver to both our members and employees very seriously and they put tremendous pressure on themselves to get our system back online.
The attitude of the staff at IMS was calm, cool, and collected which filtered down to the Bellwether staff. Everyone involved looked at this as simply another business problem to be solved. And solved it was. Our members never knew anything had happened. I couldn’t have asked for a smoother recovery.
We contract with IMS for several of their services including their Make-A-Statement system for paper and eStatements, Courtesy Pay services, and Backup & DR services to name a few. Their exemplary customer service is the reason that Bellwether has total trust in IMS. It’s also why our recovery from our system failure was just another business problem. We knew that would take great care of us.
We look for true partners that are willing to work as hard as we do in our service to our membership. We know we have found a true partner in IMS.”
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