Self-healing ATMs: An NCR White Paper

 

When your ATM is down, your “shop front” is closed. The goal must be to recover problems without downtime or to minimize it.

The purpose of this document is to provide an understanding of the self-healing capabilities of NCR SelfServ™. The paper will do this by briefly covering the background to ATM availability, describing the major problems relating to availability, and NCR SelfServ’s solution to those problems and the consequent benefits.

A redefinition
Availability redefined: Availability is all about delivering the transactions that consumers want, where and when they need them. It is about successful consumer interactions.

Today’s consumers are more demanding than ever. They are technically confident, busy, continually on the move, and they expect to be able to conduct transactions whenever and wherever they want. Loyalty is reducing and consumers will switch to other, more reliable, ATMs and financial service providers on which to perform their transactions. As ATMs offer more services, when your ATM is down, your “shop front” is closed.

ATMs already have the capability to deal with a wide range of problems and recover from them. However, there are a number of scenarios from which the ATM cannot automatically recover without a system reboot. A reboot will take some significant time during which the ATM is not available to a consumer; reboots consist of loading the operating system, the ATM platform software and consumer application software.

Depending on your software and network environment, this reboot can take up to 15 minutes or more. In some instances, the ATM will simply not recover and will be out of service until service personnel are dispatched to rectify the fault.

Industry problems
ATM systems are complex. They must cater for a range of advanced consumer transactions, work with legacy ATM systems as well as the latest hardware, new operational management software, and security updates.

These demands cause more internal interactions between subsystems (and therefore more points of potential failure) plus an increased time between reboot and consumer availability due to loading more sophisticated software.

ATM usage is far from constant. So, a 15-minute outage at peak time will cost a business much more than one in the middle of the night. At peak time, even the reboot time will cost you missing transactions, increased interchange losses and reduced customer satisfaction. So, the goal must be to recover problems without downtime. If downtime is unavoidable, then the goal must be to minimize it.

NCR Solution
NCR SelfServ ATMs are “self-healing,” a capability comprised of three main functions:

  • System Watchdog Timer
  • Shutdown Timer
  • Express Recover

System Watchdog Timer
The Watchdog Timer protects against system hangs. You might be familiar with the so-called “blue screen of death” or when your PC freezes. These instances are caused by low-level process hangs or operating system hangs.

At your PC, an attended environment, it is simple to take action to close an application or reset the PC. In the unattended self-service environment this is not possible or practical. The NCR SelfServ Watchdog Timer continuously monitors the system and when a hang condition is detected will automatically reset the ATM.