DYNA-STEP™ Customer Success

CITIBANK Maintains Top DB2 Service Levels with DYNA-STEP

Citibank has become a household word, and with the name comes a reputation for service. Mr. Eric Seifert, Vice President, oversees the data center that maintains worldwide customer information for Citicorp Customer Information Services in Long Island City, NY. Here, all information from worldwide Citibank enterprises, including Visa, MasterCard, checking/savings accounts, mortgages, and more is consolidated in one collective DB2 database.

When Seifert’s staff brought in DB2 years ago, they discovered an immediate need for a dynamic STEPLIB product to switch between test and production environments. Citibank then found DYNA-STEP, the Dynamic STEPLIB facility from Tone Software, which plays a valuable role in maintaining top DB2 service levels so critical to Citibank’s business.

Tone Software’s DYNA-STEP provided all the essential STEPLIB functions, along with many added benefits for DBAs and the Data Center. Seifert reports, “The ability to switch between different subsystems transparently is a necessity in our environment, because our end users are very service oriented. Using DYNA-STEP, users don’t have to constantly log on and off to go between systems, which significantly enhances productivity, and therefore service levels.”

Seifert feels DYNA-STEP has been beneficial to the DB2 system in other ways, such as maintenance testing. “DYNA-STEP helps us test out maintenance releases before we make them available to the user,” Seifert says. “For instance, we were on an older DB2 release in production while we were testing a newer version. Without DYNA-STEP, we would not have been able to switch between test and production systems because the command processors at that level are incompatible from one release to the other.” According to Seifert, the flexibility and value DYNA-STEP provides to the data center is enormous.

Seifert also explains that extra DASD costs are avoided with DYNA-STEP, because the need for an additional test subsystem is eliminated. “DYNA-STEP allows us to avoid replicating the entire development system for testing purposes, which saves us an incredible amount of DASD.”

DYNA-STEP has proven to be a wise investment for Citibank, says Seifert, and he often recommends the product to other installations. He concludes, “All in all, DYNA-STEP is a flexibility tool essential to any MVS or DB2 installation. It eliminates the constant LOGON/LOGOFF procedure, enhances productivity, avoids costly DASD acquisitions, and prevents maintenance hassles. No data center should be without DYNA-STEP.”

See for yourself how you can $ave money with DYNA-STEP. Simply fill out and submit the Product Information and Evaluation Request form. You can also request information by sending email to info@tonesoft.com or call one of our sales representatives at 714.991.9460.