CU*Answers, Inc., a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based cooperative CUSO, announced that its technical team had completed a migration of its entire online user base to the latest IBM POWER® server technology.  The migration, which consisted of deploying both a new production server in their Grand Rapids, MI data center and a high availability backup server in their Muskegon, MI data center, was tested and completed over the period of several weeks without disrupting any production cycles.

Scott Collins, the CU*Answers Vice President that manages the IBM relationship, noted, “Our technical team really earned their keep performing this latest technology swap.  Since our team has executed several similar projects over the past decade for not only our SaaS production environment, but also several of our self-processing credit unions, we were confident that the project would be completed in a timely, non-disruptive manner.  It took a lot of hard work by a skilled team to pull it off, and we could not be happier with the team’s execution and the performance of our new IBM mainframe.”

Collins reported that the CUSO migrated to IBM’s POWER7 processing backbone running the IBMi operating system.  “We were excited to move to this new IBM platform for its performance boost and the reliability we have always had from our IBM core servers,” said Collins, “and its ability to grow along with us positions our CUSO well for the future.  And since our IBMi allows us to activate capacity bursts a day at a time if we ever need it, we are able to manage our operations cost effectively as demand for our CU*BASE^® suite continues to grow.”