Case Study: Travis Credit Union
EVault Software streamlines data protection for Top 50 U.S. credit union
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For Charlie Roberts, vice president of IT at Travis Credit Union, managing technology processes “is about doing things better, cheaper and faster.” Concerning the integrity and availability of customer and support staff data, it simply has to work.
“I’m definitely a try-before-you-buy guy,” Roberts says.
The Vacaville, Calif.-based Travis Credit Union maintains more than $1.3 billion in assets for some 120,000 members, making it among the top 50 such institutions in the U.S. Travis had two primary backup concerns: the customer-facing, core banking-processing system running on a proprietary mini-mainframe; and its back-office, Windows servers operating Microsoft Office applications including Microsoft Exchange.
As its back-office applications capacity approached 300GB, Travis IT staff saw its tape-based backup process become increasingly cumbersome and unreliable, causing more staff to become involved, which consumed valuable manpower resources. Travis also employed three additional backup utility programs, which took additional time to manage. As data volumes grew, backup times ran long, and into more peak-usage times, slowing network performance.
The marching orders for the Travis IT staff were clear: streamline the data protection and recovery management process; improve the performance and reliability of backups and restores; and ensure information availability by assigning a second backup task to a redundant storage array at an offsite data center.
“We had too many resources dedicated to backups and they weren’t reliable enough, so that’s when we decided to look at disk-based backup,” Roberts recalls.
EVault Software proves worthy
During the evaluation, Roberts and his staff wanted a process that combined reliability and resiliency to recover data quickly and redundancy to ensure availability and help answer regulatory mandates. Not straying from Roberts’ “try-before-you-buy” mantra, the Travis IT group chose EVault Software online data protection and recovery software after a careful, several-month evaluation period.
Utilizing existing ATA disk arrays from Nexsan Technologies as their electronic storage vaults, Travis deployed and integrated the EVault Replication—One to One companion product so no additional hardware purchases were needed. In addition, Roberts estimated that by installing a reliable, automated data protection process, he freed up approximately eight man-hours each day, by spending less time on activities such as media management and troubleshooting. Nightly backups were sent to both the primary vault at Travis’ Vacaville data center and to a secondary vault at a branch office for enhanced disaster recovery protection and long-term archive.
Complements, optimizes existing infrastructure
In addition to existing advantages of faster and more reliable backup and recovery, Travis represents a growing trend of companies recognizing the shrinking cost delta between backing up to disk using ATA drives versus tape. This cost-effectiveness also eliminated the need to buy expensive tape libraries, large quantities of tape media and fees for transporting and storing tapes offsite. Prior to deploying EVault Replication—One to One, Travis IT staff spent significant manpower resources in managing tape media including tracking and moving it off-site.
On the software side, EVault DeltaPro™, the company’s patent-pending encryption and data transport technology was crucial in shrinking the Travis backup window while providing full backups using less disk space. Once installed, EVault Software Agents scan each server for changed data. EVault DeltaPro assembles a file of the data that has been created and changed since the last backup, compressed it by as much as 98 percent, then encrypts and transfers it to the primary electronic vault. Once the initial “seed” of the data is backed up to the primary vault, each scheduled backup using EVault DeltaPro is the equivalent of a complete backup, but only the changes are added to the seeded data. This delta processing, compression and encryption answered Travis’ requirement for faster backups and fulfilled the disaster recovery requirement to safely transport the data off-site.
Answering regulatory requirements
Travis is regulated by the National Credit Union Association, which mandates that data be accessible for up to seven years.
“We routinely get subpoenaed for financial records from four or five years ago. So we frequently need to refer to older data. By using EVault Software, it’s nice to not have to weed through and locate tapes that ultimately may not have the resiliency and reliability we need on the restore,” says Roberts.
Deploying EVault Software gave the credit union the ability to provide a quick restore through its primary vault, while having a secondary replication vault to ensure business continuity and to store important, yet less-frequently-accessed data.
Conclusion
In looking for a more efficient solution that answered requirements for faster, more reliable and easier-to-manage backup and recovery processes, Travis Credit Union successfully deployed EVault Software technology to replace its cumbersome tape solution. By utilizing online data protection and recovery software and leveraging inexpensive and reliable disk arrays, Roberts and his staff realized tangible cost savings through a streamlined data protection process that required less maintenance and management resources.
