IBM case study on Royal Bank of Canada

On July 28, 1972, during the dawn of electronic banking, headlines in Toronto newspapers read: “Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. the Royal Bank will open and never close again.” The story referred to the launching of RBC Royal Bank’s automated teller machine (ATM) network. With ATMs, call centers and now Internet banking, customers have had more than 30 years to grow accustomed to electronic banking. They depend on 24×7 availability, and RBC Royal Bank strives to ensure that its systems meet its customers’ demands.

With more than 12 million customers, 2.1 million online customers and approximately 58,000 employees around the globe, Toronto-based RBC Royal Bank is determined to maximize the availability of its Internet banking Web site by all means necessary. RBC Royal Bank has offered Internet banking since 1995 and has been using IBM WebSphere MQ for almost as long to integrate its core banking systems with its Web-based front ends. RBC Royal Bank counts on the reliability of WebSphere MQ message delivery to ensure completed transactions and high Web-site availability.

When RBC Royal Bank realized that it had a way to go to reach its goal of 99.999 percent availability, it welcomed the opportunity to undertake a beta test of WebSphere MQ for z/OS, Version 5.3.

Reliable messaging means better application uptime
In its Internet banking application, WebSphere MQ integrates transaction requests written in C code with the bank s backend IBM DB2 and IMS databases and IBM CICS applications. WebSphere MQ resides on a Microsoft Windows server. Backend systems and Internet front ends are housed on two IBM zSeries mainframes with an IBM Parallel Sysplex configuration.

A central, proprietary C-based mapping and integration layer on the zSeries pulls messages off the WebSphere MQ queues, determines the proper backend to receive the message and reformats messages to match the requirements of the backend system.

Together, WebSphere MQ and the mapping and integration layer comprise a reliable, single point of integration for all of RBC Royal Bank s Internet applications, taking the place of more failure-prone point-to-point integration between front ends and individual backend systems. All told, RBC Royal Bank relies on WebSphere MQ to support approximately 40 of its Web-based applications.

Discovering new WebSphere MQ features
The new version s shared persistent message feature helps improve availability by enabling queue managers to retrieve messages from queues anywhere in the bank s Parallel Sysplex configuration.

With the shared persistent message feature, says Andrew Kirkland, WebSphere MQSeries support, RBC Royal Bank, we can exploit shared queues and run multiple copies of applications on different images. If we lose an image, we don t have to lose the whole application. It s an important key to improving availability for our customers.

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For more information about RBC Royal Bank, visit:
http://www.rbcroyalbank.com