Principal chooses IBM for disaster recovery

InfoWorld - The Principal Financial Group Inc. has completed installation of a disaster recovery system from IBM designed to restore its IT and business systems in less than 24 hours after a disaster.
Principal's previous disaster recovery process took about four days and didn't extend to all applications and locations of the company. The new disaster recovery process is a vast improvement, not just for Principal but also for their customers, said Mia Arter, assistant director of IT for Principal.
"We felt it was a priority for us and for our customers to have the business back online, not just have the data secure," she said.
The new installation uses IBM's Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) and Extended Remote Copy (XRC) advanced software running on IBM eServer zSeries mainframe servers and IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Servers. Principal also runs a Parallel Sysplex with IBM's DB2 Universal Database data sharing and Capacity Backup to provide for higher availability. The solution supports group claims processing, 401(k) data, pension, life and customer relationship management systems. The system also supports customer-initiated Internet transactions, which make up approximately one-quarter of the 401(k) systems activity for Principal.
Principal is a retirement savings, investment and insurance products company based in Des Moines, with $149.8 billion in assets under management. IBM's Global Services group and its Business Continuity Services worked on the 15-month project.
The system automatically copies critical data and applications and transitions workload form the primary data center at Principal to its backup site in the event of a disaster, Arter said. "This installation is a major part of our overall effort to improve disaster recovery," she said. A key to the implementation was the 24-hour time frame to bring business applications back online after a disaster. "We felt it was a priority for us and for our customers to have the business back online, not just have the data secure," she said.
John Sing, an IBM senior consultant in the Business Continuity group, said many businesses are moving their disaster recovery to cover not just data but applications. "More and more of our customers are looking to extend disaster recovery to applications, but this installation is one of the largest yet that has implemented that strategy," he said.
Another factor important to Principal in the deployment was that disaster recovery wasn't limited to a few select sites, but provided full backup and recovery for all Principal locations. "With more than 15 million customers all over the world, we want to serve all of them in the event