Postilion, a leading global provider of payments software solutions and a division of S1 Corporation (NASDAQ: SONE), today announced that Edcon, one of Africa's leading clothing, footwear, textiles, stationery, and homeware retailers, has gone live with Postilion's active/active high availability retail solution.
Edcon is also rolling out Postilion's intelligent in-store component, eSocket.POS, to its 15 000 point-of-sale terminals. These terminals are located across 1 000 stores, which operate under 10 retail brands, such as Edgars, Boardmans, CNA, Discom, Jet, and Red Square.
Edcon is running Postilion's active/active architecture in order to maintain business continuity in the event of a communications, power, or server failure. Postilion's active/active solution runs on two servers, located in different data centres, and maintains application level synchronisation to provide full data integrity and 100% availability.
eSocket.POS handles all in-store payments processing requirements and accepts both magnetic stripe and EMV format credit and debit cards. Transactions are submitted to the central Postilion server for routing to the appropriate issuer for authorisation. The Postilion solution also provides sophisticated system monitoring and alert capabilities to ensure that high levels of customer service are continuously achieved.
To further maintain business continuity and high availability, eSocket.POS is configured so that half of the point of sale estate has one active Postilion central server as its primary processing site, while the other half is configured to the second active server. If either server becomes unavailable for any reason, transactions are switched to the other server automatically - no manual failover, staff intervention or reconfiguration is required.
“The operational costs and effort of switching over from a primary to a backup server and then back to the primary site are high. In contrast, Postilion's active/active approach of having both servers running at the same time is simpler and is centred on maintaining systems availability,” comments Henk van der Watt, Service Delivery Executive Manager at Edcon. “Our Postilion system is available 24x7, where even planned downtime becomes invisible to our store staff and customers. Operational skill requirements are also reduced, further lowering cost of ownership.”
“Postilion's active/active deployment offers retailers the ultimate in business continuity and increased service levels. It has been in operation at a number of large retailers around the world for several years. This approach to availability and disaster recovery is the only solution of its kind in the EFT space. We are proud to add Edcon, one of Africa's most dynamic retailers, to the growing list of retailers leveraging Postilion's unique active/active deployment option,” said Francois van Schoor, President of Postilion Payments.
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