CU*Answers, the cooperative CUSO headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and its sister CUSO Site-Four, the Yankton, South Dakota-based provider of data center services, are in the process of preparing for Site-Four’s periodic infrastructure upgrade. The project, which is targeted for completion in late October or early November, will replace Site-Four’s current production and high availability IBM POWER servers with new POWER9 servers. The production and backup servers are located in Yankton and Kentwood, Michigan respectively.

“Every three years our two teams work together to plan for migration to IBM’s newest POWER servers to support Site-Four’s growing business,” said Scott Collins, Executive Vice President of National Sales and Marketplace Relationships at CU*Answers. “This latest project will involve non-disruptively migrating to a new production server in their Yankton data center and a new backup server located at our Kentwood data center. We will follow the same roadmap that we have successfully used for more than two dozen similar projects for Site-Four, our self-processing credit unions and our own production infrastructure.”

Collins noted that two teams began planning for the project this past spring and that the project officially kicked off this past week when the servers were ordered from IBM. “The new hardware will be staged at the two data centers and the technical teams will begin to do their thing in early October,” said Collins. “Site-Four hosts the CU*BASE core data processing for 116 credit unions, and the new POWER9 servers will position them for the growth they expect in the next three years.”