As part of an ongoing business continuity program, Site-Four, LLC actively maintains a high-availability (HA) core-processing environment with real-time CU*BASE® data replication between identical servers located at two geographically dispersed, state-of-the-art datacenters. Regular HA rollover events are scheduled to redirect core-processing and operations to the secondary datacenter (located in Kentwood, MI) for up to seven business days. At the completion of each event, core-processing is redirected back to the primary location in Yankton, SD.
“These rollover exercises are an invaluable part of validating business continuity and recovery procedures and ensure the ongoing availability of CU*BASE core processing,” said Alan Rogers, Site‑Four CEO. “Each recovery test and high-availability rollover exercise provides us the opportunity to continually improve the process and adjust the needed procedures accordingly. The best way to accomplish this is to ‘Practice. Learn. Document. Repeat.’”
The most recent scheduled rollover was performed in October with the collaboration of recovery teams from Site‑Four, CU*NorthWest, CU*SOUTH, and CU*Answers as part of an ongoing reciprocal colocation agreement with CU*Answers dating back to 2014. As a proactive measure and to minimize disruptions at credit union branch locations, the group providers announced this planned event and strongly encouraged credit unions to test connectivity to the secondary data center in advance of the rollover.
CU*Answers CEO Randy Karnes added: “Our investment in the Site-Four data center in South Dakota is one of the main reasons our disaster recovery and business continuity infrastructure is so sound. One key reason for that is the reciprocal design: HA for the CU*Answers community going one way and HA for the Site-Four communities of CU*NorthWest and CU*SOUTH going the other way. The teams at CU*Answers, CU*NorthWest, and CU*SOUTH alongside the data center teams in Grand Rapids and at Site-Four are constantly working to ensure they hone their skills and stay on top of multiple exercises per year.”
About Site-Four LLC
As a participating member of the cuasterisk.com network, Site-Four was created to consolidate data centers of three partner organizations by offering shared and tailored operations as well as disaster recovery and remote service options. Site-Four was built to withstand the harshest of weather conditions, incorporating geothermal technology, redundant and dual energy backup infrastructure, a high availability redundancy system, and dual dedicated fiber optic communications pipelines. The CUSO stands as an example of how cooperative business design can create operational efficiencies and data center innovation, providing service bureau offerings for multiple credit union-owned organizations.
