Schwab To Deploy IBM Fault-Tolerant Technology

Charles Schwab & Co. wants to make sure its trading sitenever goes down, even if its data center does. The leading online brokerage, with 2.5 million online accounts and $560 billion in customer assets, said it is working with IBM on a three-phase rollout of the computer giant's Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex technology.

GDPS combines IBM's Parallel Sysplex, remote peer-to-peer copy, and wave division multiplexing technologies to provide synchronous mirrored links between sites up to approximately 60 miles apart. Already used by Schwab since 1997, Parallel Sysplex lets applications such as CICS, IMS, and DB2 failover to another mainframe within the data center.

Schwab, which will call its new distributed data centers Metroplex, plans to roll out the first portion of GDPS later this summer. The second phase, scheduled for an early to mid-2000 rollout, will let Schwab add existing capacity by distributing some of the processing to its alternate data center, 25 miles away from the main facility. In 2001, the final portion of the rollout calls for distributing all transaction processing across both data centers.