Central Bank of Luxembourg

Since its creation in 1998 the Central Bank of Luxembourg (or Banque Centrale de Luxembourg, in short BCL) plays a major role in Luxembourg and within the ESCB (European System of Central Banks). The BCL currently employs 204 people, 30 of which are working in the IT department.

Challenges for SkillTeam

Since the implementation in January 1999 of TARGET (Trans-european Automated Real-Time Gross settlement Express Transfer) the BCL, like all other European central banks, had to ensure an optimal high availability required for real-time international transfers. The BCL tested and compared several high availability solutions dedicated to the AS/400 environment, and short-listed only two products. The software OMS Suite™ from the company Vision Solutions was selected because it was featuring more services that were unavailable in the concurrent product. The BCL had already two AS/400 environments: one dedicated to the production and the other to the backup.

As the Industry Partner of Vision products in the Grand Duchy, SkillTeam was in charge for implementing the product on production and backup machines, respecting the integrity of the data processed by the software installed on it (in this case Olympic™ from ERI BANCAIRE); ensuring the role-swap tests (i.e. simulating a downtime of the production machine, observing the behavior of the backup machine during the failover, and correcting possible malfunctions); ensuring the product maintenance; transfer the knowledge to the IT team. And all of that in a very short timeframe.

Services and support provided by SkillTeam

SkillTeam brought its experience to BCL in terms of implementing and maintaining the Vision High Availability products, present in 30 Banks in the place of Luxembourg. Going beyond of the role of a software integrator, SkillTeam has developed a complete module for Vision called SVM/400. This module has been designed to secure the role swap between the production and the backup machine. It was completely tuned for the BCL, in order to ensure the maximum security with many extra-checkpoints.

Infrastructure of the solution

In this particular case, SkillTeam had to implement the product on two different sites. The BCL was a forerunner in BCP (Business Continuity Planning) project and decided to locate the backup machine on his Disaster Recovery site, 15 kilometers distant from the production site. The connection between the production and the backup machine is assured by a 34 Gigabit secured private line. SkillTeam took in charge the implementation as well as the role swap for both machines. The software is running now perfectly, providing the BCL with all features of a Disaster Recovery Planning. SkillTeam was able to get the product going live in just one month, fulfilling the deadlines requested by the BCL.

Benefits for the BCL

This was the first time SkillTeam worked with the BCL, who had mainly enjoyed the very close partnership between SkillTeam and Vision Solutions, providing top-level service and very fast reactivity from Vision Solutions when clients send their request to SkillTeam. The IT members of the BCL have checked this point by meeting the Chief Scientist of Vision in California thanks to SkillTeam who made this meeting possible ; the local on-line and on-site support, ensuring the BCL an immediate response to all requests ; the fact that SkillTeam, as a subsidiary from IBM, has a deep knowledge of the hardware and software components.

Today the BCL can rely on SkillTeam services to assist its staff in improving its architecture, applying evolutionary maintenance and advising it according the BCL's needs evolution. Within the scope of its Business Continuity Planning, Vision products are now playing a major role in insuring the Bank's operations continuity.

"SkillTeam offers a very good hot-line, with a fantastic on-site support with top-level engineers (….) taking advantages of very close links with Vision Solutions in California"

Claude Wies
System Administrator
BCL