TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM
Takasbank Information Technologies Department has been developing and configuring solutions to meet the business and technological objectives of Takasbank. These solutions will not only ensure growth and profitability but also assist Takasbank in reaching its goals of supporting current and future business requirements and its vision of becoming the CCP of Turkish Capital Markets.
Database Management
İDue to its nature and requirements, applications developed by Takasbank IT Department highly depend on underlying database application and data structures provided inside the DBMS. A wide variety of Takasbank applications for each of its services are provided to the members of Turkish Capital Markets and the pillar of these applications is the Takasbank RDBMS. Due to this importance, Takasbank seeks for best solutions in terms of high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery for its RDBMS infrastructure. A multi-node production database with local replicate for business continuity with a second remote replicate for Disaster Recovery Center forms the main topology. Currently the infrastructure supports +2000 concurrent connections for OLTP transactions and OLAP queries. An integrated backup system with many test & development environment, continuous validation of backups and transactions logs completes the whole picture.
Middleware Management
External applications provided to market members are web applications. These web applications are provided over either internet or a WAN extranet used by the members which require the existence of a load-balanced, highly available web and application server farm. Client requests are distributed to web servers by load balancers and these web servers relay requests to backing application servers.
Systems Technology
Takasbank’s vision of providing services using the latest technologies enables the investments and the usage of the latest hardware. Additionally, in order to maintain high available services, building clustered server environments is also acknowledged. For this reason, both for the main site and disaster recovery site, clustered servers are preferably deployed for production and testing environments. In cases where cluster architecture is not feasible, active-active load balancing or active-passive failover structures are deployed in services.
Hardware and software based replication techniques provide the replication of vital production data to the disaster recovery site.
Virtualization is one of the key technologies that Takasbank makes investments. Server consolidation, high service availability, agile service deployment, efficient usage of the hardware resources are some of the features that Takasbank is taking advantage of. Several clustered virtualization environments are used in different network segments. By using two different brands of virtualization environment, Takasbank also eliminates the risks of being dependent to a certain brand.
Network and Security
Takasbank WAN Network platform provides end-to-end communication between Takasbank and its members. Members are connected to Takasbank systems over three different physical mediums. Leased Lines (LL), Frame-Relay (F/R) and ISDN BRI.
Once the physical connection is established, than the members can start sending orders through Takasbank applications. Due to IT regulations and security reasons this traffic is passed through Firewalls and IPS system before they get processed within the Takasbank network which is provided by resilient network topology. Firewalls, IPS and the WAN Routers themselves are used to control the packets that are allowed inside the Takasbank LAN Network. Another reason is to physically separate services according to their usage/functionality by putting them on different interfaces on the FW.
For members of Electricity Market the end-to-end connection is established through internet, again the traffic gets through FW and IPS systems before it reaches to the web servers.
Primary DRC has been in operation since 2003. Primary DRC is deployed in another city far from Istanbul. Tests are performed with the participation of many members on a yearly period.
Software Development Tools and Technologies
Takasbank applications are developed by internal Takasbank application development teams based on the internal application development procedures.
Takasbank internal applications are mainly on Client/server architecture. With two-tier architecture, the database server holds both the application logic and the data.
Web Applications developed for Brokerage Houses and Bank Members have three-tier architecture using Java technology.
