Four CUSOs that are part of the cuasterisk.com network—CU*Answers, CU*Northwest, CU*SOUTH, and Site Four—recently launched a project to deploy new IBM servers in two separate data centers. Site Four’s production server, which handles the daily core data processing for the 70+ CU*NorthWest and CU*SOUTH credit unions from their data center in Yankton, is scheduled to be replaced with a new IBM POWER8 server. In conjunction with that production server, a new IBM POWER8 high availability server will be deployed at the CU*Answers Kentwood, Michigan data center. Both servers will be synchronized and brought online by mid-October.
CU*Answers Executive Vice President Scott Collins commented: “Our teams have been planning this project for several months to coincide with the expiration of Site-Four’s lease of their current high availability environment at the end of their 2017 fiscal year on September 30th. The project was given a “go” by leaders from all four CUSOs and the equipment is now at each site. The new backup server will go live before the end of September, and we are targeting a mid-October completion of the final cut-over to the new production environment. As with a dozen or more similar projects within our network over the past decade, we expect this to be non-disruptive for each of the 70+ credit unions that rely on Site-Four for their daily core operations.”
Collins noted that while the timing of this cut-over was put into place many months ago, the recent weather events in the Southern US “were a reminder that the significant amount of investment—both financially and with sweat equity—that our network has done for over a decade is a critical success factor for our partners’ ability to survive and thrive. And leveraging the latest IBM server technology will help ensure our collective business continuity goals.”