Taking the pain out of upgrades and updates

RS2 Software introduces latest technology to help its customers, especially service providers, to minimise downtime during scheduled software maintenance

For financial organisations availability is vital. Even a moment of downtime could be very expensive, if not disastrous, for such a business. Take for example the increasing pressure on banks to process transactions quickly, efficiently and securely in a world where the consumer has come to expect to pay and be paid in real-time.

“High system availability has historically been achieved by avoiding any unscheduled downtime,” explains Godwin Schembri, Chief Technical Officer at RS2 Software. “There are however countless scheduled upgrades and changes that have to be implemented in order to comply with new regulations and mandates, or changes to existing ones. These generally require some downtime.”

This is a challenge particularly for service providers who use one system to service multiple clients. These different clients generally have different requirements, sometimes even different Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) mandates relating to their specific regions and countries. While an upgrade for one client might be irrelevant for another, the system downtime more often than not affects both.

So it is important for banks and especially service providers to find easy, less-disruptive ways to update their systems.
Mr Schembri advises that banks or processors take a hard look at the capacity of service providers to minimise down-time during unscheduled as well as scheduled maintenance of their transaction software.

“Customers expect their systems to be ready and running at all times so service providers have to be prepared to deliver. For example, RS2 has put considerable effort into adapting and constantly improving its Bankworks Switch product,” says Mr Schembri.

He believes that banks and processors should insist on the following criteria when assessing their service provider’s system availability performance:
• Uninterrupted user experience during scheduled maintenance, allowing continuity of service.
• Distribution of workload among several processes, which are controlled by the application to ensure that updates to one financial institution do not disrupt the operations of any other institution.
• System changes performed to accommodate only a set of client requirements should not necessarily mean downtime for the other set of clients
• Changes to database objects should be accommodated while an application is still running without any loss of transactions, thereby minimising (or even eliminating) downtime. This feature could even be heightened when used in a distributed architecture, like RS2’s Bankworks Switch, where only a subset of its components may be in the process of being updated.
• It should also allow for the deployment of multiple versions that include new, updated switch packages which are deployed in parallel with current, older versions of the same packages. By offering different versions for different clients within the same application over a convenient timeframe, it is possible to manage upgrades one-by-one instead of all at the same time to minimise the risks.

“Maintaining access to the database during an application upgrade is one of the major challenges faced by service providers and clients,” Mr Schembri points out. “We have solved this problem by combining the distributed architecture of the Bankworks Switch product with some of the latest database features recently made available. As a result we no longer need to cut off access to the database because both the current and the new database objects are available.”

Once the new version is accepted, it can be released for other clients with the new code instantly in place. This provides the assurance that the version has been in production for other clients already. To the end user the introduction of the new code into the production environment appears to be instantaneous and scheduled downtimes are reduced even further.

This means customers are able to use a simple, single database to implement updates without the need to deploy any special infrastructure.

And finally, continuity of service is also featured in rolling back releases, as recovering the application to its original code base can be achieved without downtime.
This latest technology allows a number of upgrades that in the past required scheduled downtime, to now be performed in real-time. By upgrading only one client at a time, the impact can be further minimised. This is possible through the ability to instantly restore the database when a production problem is identified.

About RS2 Software

RS2 Software is a public-listed global provider of fully comprehensive, high-performance and high-availability card management solutions for international and domestic banks, service providers, retailers and financial organisations.
With a presence in the market for over 20 years, RS2 Software is focused on the development and implementation of flexible card payment solutions under its product brand Bankworks.

More information

Germany Tel: +49 6102 73 00 73
Malta Tel: +356 2134 5857
Email us info@rs2.com