Principal chooses IBM for disaster recovery

The Principal Financial Group has completed installation of a new disaster recovery system from IBM designed to restore its IT and business systems in less than 24 hours following a disaster.

Principal’s previous disaster recovery process took approximately four days and did not extend to all applications and locations of the company. The new disaster recovery process is a vast improvement, not just for Principal but for their customers as well, said Mia Arter, assistant director of IT for Principal.

“We felt it was a priority for us and for our customers to have the business back online, not just have the data secure,” she said.

The new installation uses IBM’s Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) and Extended Remote Copy (XRC) advanced software running on IBM eServer zSeries mainframe servers and IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Servers. Principal also runs a Parallel Sysplex with IBM’s DB2 Universal Database data sharing and Capacity Backup to provide for higher availability. The solution supports group claims processing, 401(k) data, pension, life and customer relationship management systems. The system also supports customer-initiated Internet transactions, which make up approximately one-quarter of the 401(k) systems activity for Principal.

Principal is a retirement savings, investment, and insurance products company based in Des Moines, Iowa, with $149.8 billion in assets under management. IBM’s Global Services group and its Business Continuity Services worked on the 15-month project.

The system automatically copies critical data and applications and transitions workload form the primary datacenter at Principal to its backup site in the event of a disaster, said Arter. “This installation is a major part of our overall effort to improve disaster recovery,” she said. A key to the implementation was the 24-hour time frame to bring business applications back online following a disaster. “We felt it was a priority for us and for our customers to have the business back online, not just have the data secure,” she said.

John Sing, an IBM senior consultant in the Business Continuity group, said many businesses are moving their disaster recovery to cover not just data but applications. “More and more of our customers are looking to extend disaster recovery to applications, but this installation is one of the largest yet that has implemented that strategy,” he said.

Another factor important to Principal in the deployment was that the disaster recovery was not just limited to a few select sites, but provided full backup and recovery for all Principal locations. “With more than 15 million customers all over the world, we want to serve all of them in the event of a disaster, not just some of them. Customer service was a key part of this,” Arter said.

On the technology side, Principal officials said the XRC software, which automatically copies critical data and applications, was a key factor. “When we started looking at this several years ago, we looked at synchronous mirroring, but that was not really what we needed. When XRC began to be deployed and was proven as a technology, we decided it was the right fit,” said Arter.

The new disaster recovery system improves recovery time by more than four days compared to the previous system and provides full connectivity for all remote sites, which was previously limited to a few select sites, officials said.

Recovery personnel requirements have been reduced by 55 percent, helping to mitigate the unavailable resources risk associated with a disaster, said Principal officials.

“That could be important in two ways,” said Charles King, research director at The Sageza Group. “They may be able to cut staff — or better yet, deploy additional staff to more effective projects. All in all, the disaster recovery system they’re talking about here appears to be much easier to maintain than past systems, while at the same time it does more,” he said. 

Principal officials said the primary motivation for the new installation was disaster recovery and the additional customer support that offered. But the company also said increasing regulatory requirements played a part as well. “We believe we’re being proactive on that front with this system because we may one day be required to provide service and information rapidly despite downtime,” said Arter.

Sageza’s King agreed, saying that for financial service companies such as Principal most data is compliance related. “That has only grown since the advent of the Sarbanes-Oxley and other financial disclosure requirements that have occurred since Enron,” he said.

Disaster recovery continues to be a growing business, according to IDC, which predicts that the worldwide business continuity and disaster recovery services market will increase to $2.9 billion in 2007 from $2.58 billion in 2002.