MasterCard factors 9/11 into disaster-recovery plan

O'FALLON, MO. - MasterCard International, which last year opened a gleaming $160 million data-processing campus in Missouri, is gearing up for its next challenge: building a back-up and disaster-recovery site designed for the age of terrorism.

The card-processing giant currently maintains a back-up operation at an unspecified Long Island, N.Y., location, but the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks last year on the World Trade Center spurred MasterCard to rethink its disaster-recovery plans. And a factor it had to take into account is that the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission are pushing for new rules that, among other things, would mandate a two-hour recovery time for financial services companies' systems.

MasterCard, which processes about $1 trillion annually over its global BankNet VPN, likely will build its new back-up facility about 300 miles from the new data-processing center - the minimum distance the federal government wants to allow, says Artie Ahrens, senior vice president of computer and network operations at MasterCard.

The New York disaster-recovery facility, which is actively involved in a portion of MasterCard's daily card-processing tasks, was not damaged by the Sept. 11 attacks. But for MasterCard, a new reality became evident. The company's assumption that it always would be able to fly personnel into this disaster-recovery site if necessary was wrong in that attacks shut down air travel across the country.

"We're going to move the backup closer, within three to four hours' driving range," Ahrens says. "And we're going to be able to operate it remotely. In the existing facilities in New York, you don't have all the remote controls. For instance, if I'm starting a job on a mainframe or monitoring a Unix system or reloading software today someone has to sit in front of a console in New York or here."

New digs

MasterCard is focused on getting its back-up strategy in order, even though the new data-processing facility where some 2,000 IT professionals' work is built to withstand even earthquakes. The land, in a rural area outside St. Louis, was essentially a donation from a local developer who sold several acres to MasterCard for a nominal fee in order to spur new housing and retail demand around it.

Beneath the quiet hillside, though, there's a telecom system fit for a metropolis. Southwestern Bell has installed SONET rings and multiple OC-12 links for redundancy. AT&T, MasterCard's primary carrier and the supplier of its global VPN network, has about 20 employees working full time for MasterCard. Inside one area of the data center, a giant screen, part of the Hewlett-Packard OpenView network management system, displays MasterCard's traffic volumes across the VPN.

The data center also boasts two IBM mainframes, more than 200 Cisco switches and routers, about 150 servers (mostly from Sun) and 13 EMC systems that pack 200 terabytes of storage capacity.

When it comes to security, MasterCard prefers to maintain its own disaster-recovery site rather than outsource to third-party providers.