The Banco de la Producción de Nicaragua, Banpro, is a private company founded on November 11, 1991. It is dedicated to the intermediation of deposits and investment and since its foundation has experienced a sustained growth of its assets. It is the largest bank in Nicaragua and by its size and assets ranks among the 20 largest banks in Central America.
The financial institution that has more than 3,504 points of attention and has a wide range of products and services identified the need to improve test and development environments in order to execute the projects proposed in its corporate strategy.
Harold Rodríguez, head of Database Administration, mentions that, in the test environment, it used to take at least three days to complete the process and involved backing up the database, transferring it to development environments, and then restoring it. Making this backup copy consumed significant network bandwidth, affecting the efficiency of other running applications, and required the allocation of a dedicated resource to perform overnight copies.
Faced with this need, in January, after two sessions and ITCabarique support, they integrated and implemented dbFlashCopy, a technology that reduced the entire process to 15-20 minutes (288X faster), thanks to the fact that the database is replicated synchronously while online. The time savings are significant, as now you only need to access the tool interface, specify the instance name, memory allocation and click to create the new database.
Rodríguez points out that thanks to dbFlashCopy, a significant saving of time and effort was achieved and streamlined the creation of environments by redirecting resources towards more strategic activities. «We put aside operational tasks to focus on essential database-related activities, especially monitoring, optimization and performance,» he said.
In addition to cost reductions in the additional time the DBA had to spend backing up outside of office hours, they also achieved a decrease in disk space costs.
Rodriguez points out that by reusing copy spaces in dbFlashCopy, it is possible to create clones that share the same segments of data blocks, thus avoiding space duplication. «With this improvement, we have reduced our storage consumption from 26 terabytes to a maximum of 10 terabytes, saving approximately 60% of disk space.»
dbFlashCopy has also brought global benefits in the agility of processes and projects in all business areas. For example, it meets the needs of the training department, which is responsible for the training of human talent and requires an updated environment.
The implementation of dbFlashCopy in Banpro was carried out for the purpose of managing the alternate production and disaster recovery environments of the Oracle database. In addition, the same functionalities of the tool were adopted for the update of MySQL database environments. After proofing the concept of dbFlashCopy for MySQL, they decided to change the replica they had with Master-Slave.
For Rodríguez, the use of this tool in the high availability scheme of the MySQL database, makes the switch over and the activation of the contingency database is carried out smoothly and without difficulties thanks to dbFlashCopy.
Based on his experience in both databases, the executive recommends keeping the development, test and pre-production environments updated as a preventive measure against possible errors. With dbFlashCopy it is possible to recreate each of these environments at the exact moment in which an error occurs, facilitating the diagnosis and solution of incidents. In addition, it allows a historical review of the behavior of the database and helps audit and risk issues.
Banpro also has a support contract for ITCabarique’s Oracle technology that takes advantage of the supplier’s experience to solve any incident in the shortest possible time.