NEC Software Solutions protect payment system with Standby

Their situation

The UK’s Department for Transport selected NEC Software Solutions to deliver a live registration, payment and enforcement system for foreign trucks. The system is a complex managed service encompassing technology, infrastructure, software, and business operations.

Under the levy scheme, operators need to pay before they arrive on UK soil, so the system must be available at all times. Similarly, enforcement officers need to be able to check vehicle compliance on a 24x7 basis. To ensure this level of system availability, NEC Software Solutions selected Dbvisit Standby as their business continuity software for Oracle Standard Edition.

The key challenge for the project was that NEC Software Solutions had only six months to develop, test and implement the system that would deal with £30 million in revenue per year and be available 24 hours a day. Furthermore, with a fixed legislative date for go live and significant penalties for non-delivery, NEC Software Solutions needed to ensure they had a cost-effective and robust solution which was fully operational from day one.

Overview

Solution:

Very short deployment time, 6 months from initiation of project to operation
Standby™ performs database replication and verification every few minutes to keep the data up to date and guarantee database integrity

Results:

Minimal data loss (RPO) of 5 minutes
Fast database recovery (RTO) of a few minutes

How we helped the client

On-time installation of the database and the disaster recovery system was a critical requirement for the payment system’s success. Dbvisit Standby’s simple installation and intuitive configuration options provided NEC Software Solutions with the flexibility needed to easily implement the solution. In the words of Andy Jones, NEC Software Solutions' Sales Director, “Dbvisit Standby was straightforward to install and easy for the implementation team to work with”.

Dbvisit Standby met and exceeded NEC Software Solutions’s Recovery Point Objective (the maximum allowable data loss) of several minutes. Similarly, the Recovery Time Objective (the time to recover the database) is also measured in minutes. In the solution Standby performs database replication and verification every few minutes to keep the data up to date and guarantee database integrity.

Standby provides NEC Software Solutions with robust failover functionality for database recoveries and graceful switchover for planned maintenance.

dbvisit-case-study-nec-software-solutions

Dbvisit Standby was straightforward to install and easy for the implementation team to work with.

Andy Jones Sales Director NEC Software Solutions

The positive outcome

Dbvisit helped NEC Software Solutions achieve its tight launch timelines and the payment system went live meeting all legislative requirements. During the first eight months of operation, 1.2 million levies were purchased, collecting more than £30 million in revenue.

Dbvisit Standby has performed flawlessly in this environment, successfully maintaining the integrity of the significant data volumes sustained by the system. Standby copies production data from the primary database to the standby database approximately every five minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Tags: Case Study, Oracle SE, Minimal Data Loss, Payment system, Fast recovery, Quick implementation

Protecting revenue
Easy implementation
Minimal data loss
Fast RTO

In summary

Based on their experience with Dbvisit Standby, Northgate is now looking to use Dbvisit Standby across other public sector solutions they have around the world.