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IBM RVA (Not Shark) Downs Danish Bank

Posted by byteandswitch.com on March 22, 2003

Tags: Backup & Recovery,  Infrastructure,  Other,  Storage Management

Channel: Backup & Recovery, Data Center, Other, Storage & Mgmt

Editor's Note: The original version of this story incorrectly reported that Danske Bank had experienced a failure in one of its IBM Enterprise Storage Server (a.k.a. Shark) systems. In fact, the system that failed was an older IBM Ramac Virtual Array (RVA). Byte and Switch regrets the error.

Danske Bank Corp. in Denmark saw its IT operations crippled for more than 24 hours after an IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) disk subsystem failure caused 90 databases to freeze up.

The problems began during a routine maintenance job on March 10, when a power unit in an IBM Ramac Virtual Array (RVA) storage system had to be replaced. During this process the storage system went down, triggering a string of problems in recovering the data from its IBM DB2 databases, according to Peter Schleidt, CTO of Danske Bank.

"On the restart of the IBM DB2 subsystem, the problem really took hold," Schleidt tells Byte and Switch.

Danske Bank, the 18th-largest bank in Europe, has 3 million customers worldwide and manages approximately 50 Tbytes of data on a combination of IBM Enterprise Storage Server (a.k.a. Shark) and RVA storage arrays. In addition, the bank uses IBM DB2 database software at the core of its One Group One System infrastructure program, which aims to centralize the management of all the bank's back-office IT operations.