Eurobits Technologies Migrates to the Rich IBM Cloud Services to Enhance Resilience and Agility
IBM helped Eurobits Technologies to offer rich scalable services to its clients
Challenges
As a pioneer in banking account information services, Eurobits helps banks work together so that their customers can easily pay from and manage their bank accounts at multiple banking providers. To support both of these activities, Eurobits provides secure APIs that enable trusted parties to securely share customer account details and allow customers to transfer funds without logging into their own bank. When the EU Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) entered into force, this directive enabled bank customers to use third-party providers to manage their finances. Payment service providers were legally required to support PSD2.
The company realized that it needed to build a new infrastructure with sufficient flexibility to support growth in clients, transactions, and geographic coverage. The company was hosting its core systems on co-located hardware in a third-party data center. Although this environment was fully virtualized, the underlying physical infrastructure still acted as a brake on the company’s development. Every time Eurobits outgrew a server, it had to wait for its service provider to complete upgrades or to provision additional hardware.
Initiatives
After analyzing offerings from all the major global cloud vendors, Eurobits chose IBM Cloud as its strategic platform. As the first stage in its cloud migration, and to test the IBM Cloud before fully committing, Eurobits created a disaster recovery (DR) environment in an IBM data center in Paris for its existing VMware vSphere deployments. VMware vSphere Replication synchronizes entire virtual machines from the production deployments – initially in the third-party data center – to IBM Cloud bare metal servers. An orchestration tool automatically deploys contingency virtual-machine infrastructure in the IBM Cloud should Eurobits need failover in its production environments.
Eurobits employs VMware APIs to automate the creation and migration of virtual machines for its production deployments on the IBM Cloud, using both its own scripts and scripts supplied by IBM. All the VMware virtual machines will be backed up to the Paris disaster recovery data center. Eurobits also uses IBM Cloud file storage for a large file repository connected via NFS to some of its production servers, and IBM Cloud blocks storage for backed-up disk images.
Results
Running on the IBM Cloud gives Eurobits the performance, availability, scalability, flexibility, and security it needs to stay ahead of competitors in the fast-growing and increasingly international market for open banking services. VMware vSphere on IBM Cloud bare metal servers gives Eurobits dedicated computing power to speed through transactions without the potential security risks inherent in a multi-tenant landscape. What’s more, the company can rapidly extend its core systems onto new bare metal servers, enabling it to meet emerging client demand. To conclude, Eurobits clients are quite satisfied by the rich, high-performance solutions offered by IBM.
