2007-2009 For a leading online payment provider (German bank) we develop a data center concept and play a major role in its implementation. Together with the customer and some 3rd party service providers we manage to fully meet the challenging requirements of that online payment specialist. The customer demands "zero down time" for all his mission critical applications. This includes major database updates, middleware updates as well as application releases. Due to regulations a loss of a single customer request cannot be tolerated. This applies even for the frequently performed data center switches.

Further, the customer aims to keep his advantage against his global competitors. This includes low processing costs, manageability, fast response to requirement changes, flexibility etc.

After a fast "is" analysis and a short evaluation of available technologies, it is clear that there are no "out of the box" technologies available on the market that meat these requirements in the tight budget constraints and projected time frame. Changing the whole architecture of existing mission critical applications is also not a feasible solution.

We meet the requirement goals and target costs by developing a concept:

• entirely based on commodity hardware
• lose coupling of applications
• communication protocols based on open standards
• near real time asynchronous data replication
• proactive monitoring
• and extensive use of clustering technologies.

Most of the systems are based on open source technologies. In addition we also deploy suitable commercial offerings while keeping the licensing costs on an optimal level.

Additional benefit for the customer appears as the required application changes stay at a minimum level. We analyze all affected mission critical applications and develop best practice guidelines and reference implementations that can be used for future developments.

With lots of technical presentations, workshops and trainings we can significantly improve the know how level in the company and enable their experts to maintain and further develop the system with minimal effort by external service providers

By introducing a full automatic provisioning and configuration management system, the effort for deployments and troubleshooting is kept on an extremely low level. It enables the customer to seamlessly meet most of his regulatory requirements.