Multi-site failover for a 50,000-server estate

Context

A Tier-1 financial services firm needed multi-site, multi-zone failover automation across a 50,000+ server estate spanning low-latency trading clusters, batch settlement, and regulatory reporting workloads. Manual failover drills were expensive, error-prone, and ran quarterly at best.

Problem

• Failover runbooks were Word documents, drift from reality
• DR drills required weekend windows and full team mobilization
• Real-time trading clusters (Kafka, Aerospike, DB2, MQ) had no automated cutover discipline
• Vulnerability and patch backlogs blocked compliance reporting

Approach

• Automated multi-site / multi-zone failovers for business continuity across the full estate
• Zero-downtime release patterns on VMware Tanzu (PCF) and Kubernetes — Rolling, Canary, and Blue/Green with automated rollback
• Real-time monitoring via Splunk and Grafana for Kafka, Aerospike, DB2, and MQs in low-latency trading clusters
• Enterprise vulnerability management using Qualys (scanning), SCCM (Windows deployment), and ServiceNow (change / incident); maintained SLA compliance and drove KRI reporting via Splunk dashboards
• Privileged machine identity lifecycle (PKI / SSL / TLS / SSH) using CyberArk PAM, Venafi, HashiCorp Vault, and CredHub across containerized and VM environments

Outcome

• DR drills shifted from quarterly weekend events to weekly automated runs
• Mean-time-to-failover for trading clusters reduced from hours to minutes
• 100% SLA compliance on vulnerability remediation across the estate
• Zero standing privileged access on the server fleet

Stack

VMware Tanzu (PCF), Kubernetes, Kafka, Aerospike, MQ, DB2, Ansible, SaltStack, CyberArk PAM, Venafi, HashiCorp Vault, CredHub, Qualys, SCCM, ServiceNow, Splunk, Grafana.