YANKTON, S.D.– As part of its business continuity program, a rollover test has been successfully performed by Site-Four and CU*NorthWest, CU*SOUTH, and CU*Answers as part of an ongoing reciprocal colocation agreement with CU*Answers dating back to 2014.
“As a proactive measure and to minimize disruptions at credit union branch locations, the group providers announced this planned event and strongly encouraged credit unions to test connectivity to the secondary data center in advance of the rollover,” the organizations said. Site-Four reported it actively maintains a high-availability (HA) core-processing environment with real-time CU*BASE data replication between identical servers located at two geographically dispersed, state-of-the-art datacenters. Regular HA rollover events are scheduled to redirect core-processing and operations to the secondary datacenter, located in Kentwood, Mich., for up to seven business days. At the completion of each event, core-processing is redirected back to the primary location in Yankton, S.D., the organizations said.
‘Invaluable’ Business Continuity Tool
“These rollover exercises are an invaluable part of validating business continuity and recovery procedures and ensure the ongoing availability of CU*BASE core processing,” said Alan Rogers, Site‑Four CEO. “Each recovery test and high-availability rollover exercise provides us the opportunity to continually improve the process and adjust the needed procedures accordingly. The best way to accomplish this is to ‘Practice. Learn. Document. Repeat.’”
Added Randy Karnes, CEO of CU*Answers, “Our investment in the Site-Four data center in South Dakota is one of the main reasons our disaster recovery and business continuity infrastructure is so sound. One key reason for that is the reciprocal design: HA for the CU*Answers community going one way and HA for the Site-Four communities of CU*NorthWest and CU*SOUTH going the other way. The teams at CU*Answers, CU*NorthWest, and CU*SOUTH alongside the data center teams in Grand Rapids and at Site-Four are constantly working to ensure they hone their skills and stay on top of multiple exercises per year.”