The Bank of Papua New Guinea (BPNG) are Papua New Guinea's Central Bank. BPNG is an independent central bank which was first established prior to Papua New Guinea's independence on 1 November 1973. An important aim for the Bank is to support the expansion and diversification of the financial sector to provide competitive access to financial products and services for all PNG citizens. Financial inclusion is a priority for the Bank, and they strive for cost-effective and fit-for-purpose financial services delivered to all, including those in rural and remote locations of Papua New Guinea.
The Bank had implemented several Oracle database to support their central banking function and an organisation-wide ERP system to modernise and standardise their business processes. Whilst the technology was fit for purposes, the Bank was experiencing significant unreliability, poor performance and unscheduled outages.
As part of becoming the client's Oracle MSP replacing a local organisation that suffered from a lack of experience to meet the Bank's challenges, Pebble IT were asked to design a new solution to migrate their Oracle software to and to cater for future expansion that was on the horizon. As Pebble IT had delivered significant stability and performance improvements at QLD's PowerLink through the migration to Oracle Exadata, Pebble IT had the real-world experience that the Bank required. We were also agile enough to cope with the learnings required in delivering Papua New Guinea's first Exadata and the challenges that this presented. In essence, Pebble IT was asked by the Bank what would be required to improve the quality of their Oracle systems to be at a level deserving of a central bank.
Once the Exadata BoM was agreed and ordered, the first challenge was that the Exadata's were pre-racked and could not fit onto any cargo plane that was allowed to land in Port Moresby at the time. So shipped by sea it was. The next challenge was that the doorways were too small on one of the data centres to permit entry. With Pebble IT on-site to ensure quality outcomes were achieved, creative solutions were found.
Once established and on the BPNG networks, we had a plan of migrating Oracle databases from disparate locations throughout BPNG onto the Exadatas. BPNG went live in an agile manner, and we migrated databases across over time with newly installed databases that were correctly configured for the Exadata. This was the first that the Bank had Real Application Clusters (RAC), encryption and Dataguard which was used to enable a Disaster Recovery to a 2nd data centre.
This was more akin to a revolution for the Bank than an evolution. The stability, reliability and performance this brought to the Bank was unheralded and delivered the Bank the region's most premiere solution, greater than anything else found in the Government or local banking industry.
The Exadatas delivered local redundancy of 2 nodes where systems could continue if a node failed without having to failover to the DR. When power or data-centre related issues did occur, the DR was reliable with only a small outage window as applications were re-routed and databases were changed over to be the primary.
The resilience of the Exadatas has been constantly mentioned at all management levels of the Bank and is viewed as an example of how systems should operate. It wasn't just the capability of the Exadatas, but the configuration and management processes implemented to ensure that the benefits of the Exadata were delivered to the Bank.
Through delivering a world-class solution to the region, Pebble IT has become a constant presence at the Bank and is a key advisor in strategic IT decisions that continues to this day. If you are in Papua New Guinea or anywhere in the Oceania region, Contact us to learn how we can work together to lower costs and achieve strategic outcomes.
