Situation

A large, global financial services company is pursuing digital transformation initiatives across the board, with one of its biggest priorities being application modernization. The bank wants to untether itself from the mainframe and its existing monolithic environment and migrate to a modern microservices-oriented, cloud native architecture to better serve its customers and exponential growth in volume. A second priority is to consolidate the numerous database technologies to simplify their environment and lower costs. One of their chief leaders explained, “We don’t need all of these databases, we just need to have a few cloud native databases that do the things we need them to do.” Additionally, the company aims to keep the door open for potentially using public cloud resources in the future.

Challenge

The company needed to innovate at a quicker pace, while still being able to provide global customers with the always available financial products and services they need. This is a challenging endeavor, given there are many such products and services that need to be made cloud native. They kicked this process off by identifying a critical business application that manages customer data and accounts online, which was experiencing performance bottlenecks.

Provisioning and maintaining the existing DB2 data infrastructure on the mainframe was operationally complex and was slowing down the innovation of new features. Making DB2 highly available on the mainframe involved very expensive replication technology and wasn’t able to provide strongly consistent data across data centers. In addition, the company wanted to open the door to leveraging the public cloud in the future, which is something they could not do with DB2 on the mainframe. The financial institution needed to take a fresh look at their underlying data tier, and looked to distributed SQL database vendors for help.

Database Requirements

• High availability for a service that manages trillions of dollars in assets
• Support for essential RDBMS features, plus async replication
• Distributed by design and can be deployed across data centers and the public cloud
• Strong data consistency and ACID compliance for distributed transactions
• Active/active deployment with sustained low latencies while handling high throughput updates
• Strong suite of security features, such as integration with volume-level encryption from industry leading vendors

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