IPCheck Monitors International INTRUST Bank
IPCheck Server Monitor at International INTRUST Bank
Management Summary
From its humble beginnings of $50,000 in 1876, INTRUST has grown to become one of the leading financial institutions in the Midwest with assets of $2.8 billion. INTRUST Financial Corporation is the largest independent bank holding company headquartered in Kansas.
INTRUST (www.intrustbank.com) has locations in Andover, Augusta, Derby, El Dorado, Haysville, Lawrence, Manhattan, Overland Park, Prairie Village, Shawnee, Topeka, Valley Center and Wichita, Kansas, and Moore, Mustang, Norman and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
The Challenge
INTRUST has approximately 130 servers, including 10 web servers, a three server Microsoft Exchange cluster, several SQL servers, and a number of application-specific servers. They are a Cisco-based network running redundant 6509 core switches and various models of workgroup switches. INTRUST’s wide area network (WAN) is comprised of almost 50 branches which are connected using Cisco routers. Each branch has its own file/print server. Too frequently, the bank’s customers were notifying them of web site crashes they had not detected. Internal systems also failed intermittently without a way for the bank to proactively detect them.
The Solution
INTRUST has now used IPCheck for many years to monitor their web servers. INTRUST initially installed IP Check on the single web server so that when the server failed to respond properly to a query, IPCheck would run a batch file that reset the web service. From there, its role expanded to monitoring various subsidiary systems and performing remote reboots on failed systems. Recently INTRUST converted a number of ATM machines from SNA over SDLC connections to TCP/IP VPN on DSL. SNA/SDLC connections were slow but reliable, the TCP/IP connections are much faster but more prone to failure due to their complexity. By using IPCheck INTRUST ensures that their ATM machines are running as close to 24x7 as possible.
Customer Benefit
With the ability to use SNMP and custom scripting INTRUST is finding ways to be more proactive. Monitoring CPU utilization on core switches and disk space usage on database servers has allowed greatly improved uptime of certain mission critical applications:
Example 1: A busy database server would regularly exhaust its available disk space. The web application that used this database would crash and not recover until the database was fixed and the web server rebooted. Using IPCheck allows INTRUST to work on the database when it needs attention and before it becomes a problem. The uptime of the web server has risen from about 98% to 99.99% since IPCheck was installed.
Example 2: A web service that provides images to internet banking customers went through a difficult phase during an upgrade. IPCheck was able to monitor the system and force reboots when it failed. The average down time went from approximately 60 minute a week to 5 minutes/week.