AB Suite Client Completes Upgrade to ClearPath Forward Libra System
A bank in Asia and longtime EAE and Agile Business Suite (AB Suite®) client needed to ensure its products and services delivered the experience and security today’s consumers demand. From the bank’s perspective, this meant achieving three distinct objectives: shorten development times, increase performance, and improve security.
Slow development environments made it difficult to bring new offerings to market in a timely manner. Meanwhile, production performance – especially in the area of overnight batch processes – needed to improve so the bank could handle increasing workloads and rising end-user requirements. And with concerns over fraud, breaches, and theft continuing to mount, strengthening security was an absolute imperative.
Upgrading to AB Suite some years ago, and using the solution’s REORGDB feature, helped the bank minimize downtime during database reorganizations. To build off of this momentum, it partnered with Unisys again to architect and implement an infrastructure that could address its latest needs while helping it continue to leverage the proven benefits of the ClearPath Forward™ environment.
Production, Development, and Recovery, Reimagined
The work Unisys performed for the bank targeted both its primary and secondary sites.
At the bank’s primary site, Unisys replaced an existing ClearPath® Libra system with a new ClearPath Forward Libra 6390 system. Built on the innovative ClearPath Forward architecture, this new system gives the bank an Enterprise Partitionable Platform (EPP) that can be freely and securely divided into partitions dedicated to both ClearPath and Microsoft® Windows® workloads – all of which are tied together by the system’s internal, high-speed interconnect.
The bank used this flexibility to deploy three EPPs within its new Libra environment – one for production and two for development. Along with providing connectivity to the system’s MCP operating environment, the production EPP features six Windows partitions, which include dedicated instances of Unisys Operations Sentinel software and AB Suite Client Tools servers.
The two development EPPs feature eight Windows partitions, two of which the bank chose to dedicate to ClearPath MCP Developer Studio. Part of the ClearPath Software Series, MCP Developer Studio enables the bank to run multiple MCP development environments within a single system. Its developers can easily stage different MCP releases, test changes to multiple MCP applications, or even individually test newly developed MCP applications.
Other Windows partitions on a separate ClearPath Forward system were implemented in order to host the AB Suite Model database and build servers.
In addition to the hardware refresh at the bank’s primary site, Unisys also deployed a ClearPath Forward Libra 4390 system at its secondary site, along with modified disaster recovery procedures, to help the bank improve its business continuity measures. And, both the primary and secondary sites were equipped with virtual tape libraries (VTLs) from Dynamic Solutions International that feature 32TB of memory and self-encrypting drives.
Faster Development, Better Security
With the help of the new ClearPath Forward Libra 6390 system, MCP Developer Studio, business continuity implementation, and VTL deployments, the bank was able to accelerate the speed with which it can develop new offerings while making its entire environment significantly more secure.
MCP Developer Studio played an instrumental role in helping the bank improve its development processes. In the past, many of the bank’s AB Suite developers felt that build times were too slow. But now, those concerns have been all but eliminated. MCP build phases accelerated significantly, while Windows build phase times were cut by roughly 48%.
And because nearly everything is happening in partitions within the bank’s new Libra systems – which leverage the point-to-point connectivity provided by the high-speed interconnect, instead of the Ethernet “broadcast” approach – security is stronger, as well.
As these results show, the choice to implement a new Libra system and supplement it with offerings like MCP Developer Studio have put the bank on an exciting new path – one that leaves it much better equipped to provide the experience and security its customers demand.