"Many large international banks have separate systems in each country, but centralizing internal finance, human resources, and payroll operations gives us a lot of benefits on the business side," says Schleidt. "It's an efficient architecture, and we have proven it works when we have acquired other banks."
Well, it was great, until it broke down, Schleidt admits. When the bank attempted to restart DB2 from its last backup, a bug in the database software caused inconsistencies to occur in the data. This corruption caused Danske Bank's trading desks, currency exchange, equities, and clearing with other banks to grind to a halt.
IBM engineers worked locally and from the company's DB2 labs in the U.S. to fix the problem. According to the bank, IBM is now sending out a patch to all its mainframe customers running DB2.
This wasn't the first time Danske Bank has run into problems with IBM storage equipment. In November 2002, one of its Shark subsystems disconnected from the network after a technician incorrectly configured two Sharks with the same IP address, according to an IBM spokesman. IBM says this outage, which caused the bank's e-banking operations to go offline temporarily, was attributable to "human error" and says steps have been taken to prevent such outages in the future.
After Danske Bank's DB2 systems went down last week, it was able to fall back on its asynchronously mirrored site, 200 kilometers away from the primary data center, to keep some of its services -- such as its ATM machines and Internet banking service -- up and running.
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