SAN Backs Up Financial Assets

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Trust has automated paper-mail routing and audiotape retrievals using a sophisticated storage area network.

Software called Automated Work Distributor from DST Systems Inc., designed specifically for financial applications, entirely replaces routing of paper-based mail. When documents come in to Morgan Stanley's mail room, they are opened and read by mail-room staff, who affix a bar code to the documents. They are then scanned into computers and routed to the appropriate employee for further action.

"Because of these imaging applications, we use a tremendous amount of storage, and we've elected to use an EMC storage [system] because it's the most reliable we've found," said Gary Hegedus, chief information officer for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Trust, the asset management arm of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co.

A Windows NT LAN runs the imaging workflow management system. The system has been in place for about a year and has allowed the subsidiary to expand its account base by 20 percent without adding additional staff.

Morgan Stanley also is implementing a database for its existing library of Dictaphone tapes that are used to record all telephone conversations between staff members and clients. Under the old filing system, the staff could take up to six hours to manually find a particular tape of a phone call; now, the index of tapes is being linked to the workflow management software so that any tape is immediately available.

The company is adding a robotic retrieval system to access the tapes quickly. That kind of responsiveness is especially valuable when a customer denies placing an order for stock; it can nip a potentially expensive conflict in the bud.

"A customer calls up and says, 'Buy 100 shares of a stock.' If there's a major correction, all of a sudden he calls in tomorrow and he denies it. He says he said to sell 100 shares. If you can check the tape when the customer is on the phone, it heads off arbitration and legal issues," Hegedus said.

Both systems rely on 3 terabytes of SAN technology supplied by EMC Corp.

They also call on EMC's 5700 SAN to store System 390 mainframe database and imaging data from an NT LAN for 140 mutual funds containing $130 billion in assets for 7.5 million customers.

The company uses an IBM 9740 mainframe system with IBM's OS/390 and DB2 database running a traditional batch-oriented financial transaction database, plus about 22 IBM Netfinity Intel-architecture servers supporting some 500 Windows NT workstations on a TCP/IP network.

The company maintains a backup facility 15 miles from the company's Jersey City, N.J., data center. Data is copied to the backup facility in real time, and in the event the main data center fails, the backup data center can come online within 45 minutes.

The data is stored using TimeFinder and EMC's Data Manager software, which allow the company to take a snapshot of the database--a copy of all the information frozen at a particular point in time--and then use the mirror-image copy to make a backup at a remote location.

The company has 1.5 terabytes of storage at the backup location, including all the production data but not test data. The backup location and main data center are linked by a T1 line.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Trust also plans to go online with a Web-based commerce system in August, which will allow clients to log onto a Web site and retrieve any of the data over a telephone voice-response system, including daily positions and historical performance statements.

That will require links from a Web server to the DB2 server on the mainframe to process information requests in real time.