Case Study: Westpac Institutional Bank achieves 99.99% uptime for critical payments with Stratus Technologies

Virtual Infrastructure For Critical Financial Application Leaves No Margin For Error

Westpac Institutional Bank needed a highly resilient front-end platform for its Westpac Integrated Banking Service (WIBS), a customer-facing managed file transfer system that handles critical payments and financial data. The bank wanted to virtualize WIBS and a dozen other production applications while guaranteeing 99.99% availability, integrating seamlessly with back-end systems, and avoiding the complexity, cost, and inefficiency of traditional active/standby clustering.

Westpac deployed Stratus ftServer fault-tolerant servers with ftScalable storage and VMware vSphere, running 13 virtual machines across three ftServers and replacing about 20 physical servers and storage devices. The new solution supports roughly 300,000 workflows per month (about AUD$40B monthly, or ~AUD$1.25M per minute), has delivered no unplanned downtime since implementation, and reduced operational and utility costs while improving manageability and proactive vendor support.

Westpac Institutional Bank

Leigh Mahoney

Executive Director, Core Banking and Transactional Services