The Challenge of Fail-Safe Data Protection for a Dispersed IT Environment in the Financial Sector

Case Study: HeritageBank
Banking on DR: HeritageBank of the South's Investment in Disaster Recovery Software Yields High ReturnsHeritageBank of the South is a community-oriented regional bank serving southwest Georgia and north central Florida. Founded in 1955, the company offers personal banking, commercial banking and investment services through eight full-service of? ces. HeritageBank was primarily using tape backup methods to protect sensitive and critical internal data. However, this approach was proving too unreliable, time-consuming and burdensome for a ? nancial services company challenged with a limited IT staff, geographically distributed servers and a complex, growing set of federal compliance mandates. The Challenge: Fail-Safe Data Protection for a Dispersed IT EnvironmentHeritageBank'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 ? nancial services industry, audit issues and fed-eral compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley were also drivers for a disaster recovery implementation." The Solution: DR-Scout Earns Interest from HeritageBankHeritageBank 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 signi? cant 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 traf? c from our Cisco VoIP phone system." Checking the Savings: DR-Scout Conserves Administrative Time and ResourcesAs 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 ? fteen 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 ac... [download for more]