HeritageBank of the South is a community-oriented regional bank serving southwest
The Challenge: Fail-Safe Data Protection for a Dispersed IT Environment
HeritageBank’s main data center is located at one of its Albany-based branches, with a secondary east data center 12 miles away. The information technology infrastructure is primarily Windows-based, with a production environment that is partially virtualized via VMware. A 3.2 TB iSCSI-based storage area network sits at each data center. HeritageBank’s goal was to implement data replication across the two data centers for maximum redundancy and protection.
“We were using tape backup and it was hit or miss,” says Jim Yarber, Senior Manager of Network Operations, HeritageBank of the South. “My main concern was that internal data such as e-mail, accounting, human resources, marketing and mortgages, were on servers distributed all over the place. We had tape backups at each location, but it was a decentralized approach based on older technology - not the ideal situation for disaster recovery. I needed a solution that would allow me to sleep at night knowing that data wouldn’t be lost in the event of a system failure or natural disaster. Being in the financial services industry, audit issues and federal compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley were also drivers for a disaster recovery implementation.”
The Solution: DR-Scout Earns Interest from HeritageBank
HeritageBank evaluated both disaster recovery and more traditional backup software offerings from different vendors, including Santa Clara-based InMage Systems. InMage’s DR-Scout is a combined DR and business continuity solution based on patent-pending continuous data protection (CDP) technology. It addresses disaster recovery, continuous local backup and application availability.
“I did four months of due diligence and found nothing that would give me the protection that DR-Scout offered,” says Yarber. “It came at the right time. We were in the process of consolidating servers and splitting them between the two data centers. I had some redundancy built in, but not enough to protect me. We have an Exchange server at each data center and implemented DR-Scout to provide cross-data center volume replication for maximum data protection. All the information from the main data center replicates to the east data center, and vice versa. God forbid a tornado hit one of our buildings, the other one would be safe.”
DR-Scout’s feature set and its ability to do very fast restoration were significant factors in Yarber’s choice, but another big selling point was its minimal bandwidth use. “I’ve got a 100M Ethernet connection between our two data centers, and DR-Scout barely scratches it,” continues Yarber. “It was important to me that whichever solution we chose have no negative effect on productivity, since we have data and voice going across the same circuit. That’s constant e-mail for 140 users and traffic from our Cisco VoIP phone system.”
Checking the Savings: DR-Scout Conserves Administrative Time and Resources
As with any IT implementation, return-on-investment was a criterion used by HeritageBank to evaluate the success of the DR-Scout implementation.
“The ROI is outstanding,” says Yarber. “DR-Scout is not a big piece of my IT budget, yet its impact would lead you to think it is. We have also greatly reduced our tape inventory since implementing DR-Scout. Physical media gets expensive, so there are savings there as well.”
The implementation of DR-Scout conserves time and resources for HeritageBank’s labor capital, including both IT staff and general employees. Continues Yarber, “I’ve had DR-Scout installed for fifteen months now, and there has been a remarkable difference in administrative overhead and overall productivity compared to when we used tape backup. In the past, if someone accidentally deleted a folder, I’d have to send a runner off site to go get the tape, bring it back, put it in the tape drive, hunt for the lost data and do a restore. That could easily take an hour or more. Now if that same scenario occurs, I simply open up the DR-Scout interface, pull up the data and restore the volume – all in under five minutes.”
“We are a regional bank, so there are not a lot of people in the IT department,” says Yarber. “I am extremely busy and can’t afford to spend all my time managing software. Once DR-Scout was up and running in, I’ve had to pay very little attention to it. The backups that I was previously doing weekly, I am now doing monthly and they are condensed backups because now all the data is in one place. The general increase in employee productivity has been tenfold. Previously we would be down for hours due to accidental file deletions or occasional e-mail outages that could have been saved by DR-Scout. Now we no longer lose that valuable time.”
Adding it All Up: The Benefits of InMage Systems’ Disaster Recovery Software
DR-Scout provided HeritageBank of the South with a powerful disaster recovery and business continuity solution for its critical data. The benefits to the company included:
- Reduced administrative overhead – IT staff saves a minimum of several hours per week performing backup and restore processes
- Tenfold increase in overall employee productivity as a result of improved data and application availability
- Greatly reduced restore times – lost or deleted files that once took at least an hour to restore now only take seconds
- Reduced physical media costs as DR-Scout assumed much of the backup responsibilities previously fulfilled by tape backup
- Little to no impact on bandwidth - The Ethernet connection between the two data centers handles both voice and data. DR-Scout’s cross-data center replication has zero impact on the productivity
“The most important thing for me is that now I can sleep at night,” concludes Yarber. “If data is lost through either an accident or user intervention, I can restore it in minutes. We’ve had instances where we’ve had server failures and been able to restore the data very quickly. It is backed up and protected. Just to get this load off my mind has dramatically allowed me to do other things. There’s still much more I’m planning to do with DR-Scout. We’ll be putting a DR-Scout server in the new