Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft. SharePoint, Sybase ... chose an enterprise storage and business continuity solution fro
Independent Bank
Financial services provider harnesses competitive advantage with EMC OVERVIEW Independent Bank Corporation is an Ionia, Michigan-based bank holding company with total assets of approximately $2.1 billion. Independent Bank delivers a full range of financial services, including retail and commercial banking, mortgage lending, investments, and title services.
BUSINESS CHALLENGES Independent Bank has aggressively adopted online processes from retail banking to loan origination and other operations. With this transformation driving extremely rapid data growth, the bank's legacy EMC storage had nearly reached capacity. In
ESSENTIALS
addition, Independent Bank's previous NetApp storage was causing performance
Industry
bottlenecks in its large virtualized desktop environment, disrupting employee
Financial services
productivity and the delivery of customer services.
Company Size
After evaluating solutions from EMC, NetApp, and Dell Compellent, Independent Bank
1,000 employees
chose an enterprise storage and business continuity solution from EMC.
Business Challenges
Tom McKowen, Independent Bank's vice president of information technology,
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Rapid adoption of paperless banking operations
•
Data growth causing capacity and performance shortcomings on installed NetApp infrastructure
Solutions
explains, "EMC's enterprise storage is best in class, and we liked the scalability and flexibility that it provides compared to other vendors' solutions. Plus, NetApp and Dell weren't able to provide the complete, integrated portfolio of solutions that EMC offers."
SOLUTIONS Independent Bank has built a private cloud based on EMC® VMAX® 10K enterprise storage configured with three tiers of flash, Fibre Channel, and SATA drives, along
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EMC VMAX 10K
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EMC FAST VP
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EMC VPLEX Metro
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EMC RecoverPoint
mobility and continuous availability of all critical applications.
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VMware vSphere
The EMC VPLEX active-active infrastructure integrates with Independent Bank's entire
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VMware vCenter Site Recovery
VMware® vSphere™ virtualized environment, which runs key financial applications
Manager •
Citrix XenApp
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FiServ Unifi, Harland, Hyland OnBase, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Sybase, Progress
with EMC FAST™ VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools). With a second VMAX in a remote data center less than 50 miles away, Independent Bank uses EMC VPLEX® Metro to enable an active-active data center environment for data
such as FiServ Unifi loan origination, Harland, and FIS core banking, as well as general business applications, such as Hyland OnBase enterprise content management, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, and Progress. Independent Bank also consolidated approximately 1,000 Citrix XenApp virtual desktops from NetApp onto VMAX 10K. In addition, Independent Bank relies on EMC RecoverPoint® for remote data protection of its legacy non-virtualized applications, as well as test, development, and pre-production environments. The bank also uses RecoverPoint integrated with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to protect its less-critical virtualized applications.
CUSTOMER PROFILE
Results •
With an infrastructure that is fully standardized on EMC enterprise storage,
Accelerated digital banking initiatives
• • •
Provisioned new application
system, EMC Atmos® cloud storage, EMC SourceOne™ email management, and EMC Kazeon® eDiscovery.
environments 200 percent faster
ACCELERATING ONLINE BANKING
Increased virtual desktop
Since deploying FAST VP on VMAX, Independent Bank has further embraced
performance by 300 percent
electronic banking channels and improved business and operational efficiency thanks
Reduced RPO of 15 minutes and
to increased storage performance, capacity, and availability. In fact, with retail
RTO of four hours to nearly zero •
Independent Bank also uses EMC Avamar® deduplication backup software and
Accelerated business continuity testing from two weeks to two hours
banking and lending operations relying heavily on digitized enterprise content to streamline check processing, account statements, and loan origination, the EMC implementation easily handled data growth from 15 to 29 terabytes in less than 18 months. "We've been able to accelerate our digital banking initiatives because of the great performance and flexibility that VMAX and FAST VP provide," says McKowen. "EMC eliminated so much administrative overhead for provisioning storage that we can turn out new application environments 200 percent faster than before. And pre-planning time to bring new applications to market has shrunk by 50 percent."
"By moving our Citrix XenApp environment from NetApp to VMAX with FAST VP, we've seen disk performance increase 300 percent compared to NetApp. We've heard a lot of feedback from users that their virtual desktops are much snappier." Tom McKowen Vice President of Information Technology at Independent Bank
SNAPPIER VIRTUAL DESKTOPS By migrating its virtual desktop infrastructure off NetApp and onto VMAX, Independent Bank dramatically enhanced desktop performance while improving storage utilization. "With our Citrix XenApp environment moving from NetApp to VMAX with FAST VP, we've seen disk performance increase 300 percent," says McKowen. "We've heard a lot of feedback from users that their virtual desktops are much snappier." McKowen also reports that utilization has improved from 80 percent to 20 percent since consolidating on VMAX.
ELIMINATING DOWNTIME In today's around-the-clock banking industry, VPLEX provides Independent Bank with a storage infrastructure that is continuously available, regardless if individual system components fail or require maintenance. In fact, with an active-active data center infrastructure, the bank can avoid downtime even if an entire site loss occurs. For example, VPLEX and VMAX have helped Independent Bank decrease both its recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and recovery time objective (RTO) of four hours to nearly zero for system failures. McKowen says, "Routine maintenance used to require two to four hours of downtime, which was very disruptive to the business. Now, because we can instantly failover to our other data center, we've eliminated that problem. Overall, uptime has improved about 300 percent since moving to the active-active environment."
BUSINESS CONTINUITY STAFFING RESOURCES REDUCED The VPLEX infrastructure also enables Independent Bank to test its business continuity plan in a less disruptive manner, and more frequently and with fewer resources than previously. "Before, we spent two weeks prepping and running our business continuity tests," explains McKowen. "Testing would tie up 12 to 15 FTEs from IT, plus representatives from the business unit. Now just three FTEs can do the testing in a few hours. Instead of only once a year, we can now test semiannually, quarterly—as often as necessary."
BUILDING A STRONG HOUSE McKowen cites a strong partnership with EMC as essential for continuing to adapt Independent Bank's cloud infrastructure. "We've looked at other vendors, but always come back to EMC because they do so much more than just sell products," McKowen reflects. "EMC values us as a partner. They work to understand our business and offer an entire portfolio of products to address our needs as they evolve." He adds, "We've built a house that is very capable, very flexible. Our new EMC infrastructure has definitely made us more competitive and responsive to change."
CONTACT US To learn more about how EMC products, services, and solutions can help solve your business and IT challenges, contact your local representative or authorized reseller— or visit us at www.EMC.com.
EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, Atmos, Avamar, FAST, Kazeon, RecoverPoint, SourceOne, VMAX, and VPLEX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware and vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc., in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 12/13 Customer Profile H12391
www.EMC.com
EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.
