ICEFLO delivers payments platform technology refresh

The Challenge

A technology refresh on a critical business system of this scale represents a huge feat of planning, organisation and orchestration. From the outset, the strategy was to adopt a low-risk approach, implementing a series of incremental changes.  Time was the biggest challenge - both in terms of the need to get the job done as quickly as possible and the restrictive constraints in terms of planned downtime to facilitate this essential work.

The scope of work was as follows:

• Over 90 high-value corporate payments systems supported on the platform
• 22 separate "nodes" configured as an Oracle High Availability "grid"
• Shutdown and start-up procedures were poorly documented and often problematic
• Physical servers to be swapped out, and new OS to be installed on replacement servers
• Database components to be upgraded, including clustering software
• Rigorous application checkout to be performed on each change cycle

ICEFLO consultants led and delivered the project, working closely with the clients staff and 3rd parties. The first challenge was to document and fully rehearse the shutdown and start-up procedures, capturing the steps, owners and timings in detailed runbooks. Test environments were used to achieve this level of understanding before any attempt was made to upgrade Production.