UTG & NetApp Develop Enterprise-class Backup System

We recently partnered with the leading innovator of storage and virtualization solutions, NetApp, to implement an incredibly successful backup system for one of our long-term clients, SRP Federal Credit Union in North Augusta, South Carolina. Faced with SRP’s unwieldy and fragmented local storage, which was significantly impacting efficiency and risking customer data, UTG set out to plan a new centralized data center and a fully redundant disaster recovery bunker in conjunction with NetApp.

Founded in 1960, the SRP Federal Credit Union has grown to 350 full time employees located at 20 branch offices throughout Georgia and South Carolina. The backup windows of their critical data were quickly growing beyond the acceptable limits. While planning for replication to the disaster recovery facility, there was no clean way to replicate the data with their existing server architecture. Because the SAN solution is so foundational to the entire IT infrastructure, UTG recommended NetApp as the storage vendor based on the vendor’s exceptional engineering and cost-effective value.

UTG helped SRP migrate their current infrastructure to a blade server solution leveraging NetApp unified storage architecture. Once the production environment was running on this new equipment, it was extremely easy to replicate the entire server system to a second NetApp that would be used for disaster recovery in the off-site data center. NetApp’s SnapMirror® was finely tuned to meet SRP’s recover point objectives so that SRP could get back to serving their members quickly in the event of a disaster.

UTG was also able to utilize the NetApp solution to resolve many of the backup challenges facing SRP. NetApp’s Snapshot technology is the industry’s most functional point-in-time copy technology, allowing SRP to protect their data with no performance impact and minimal consumption of storage space. SRP can now make up to 255 snapshots that can be accessed directly from a Windows Server for easy and instant data recovery.

NetApp’s unified storage architecture greatly facilitated what threatened to be a very difficult move. Their SnapMirror replication software instantly created enterprise-class disaster recovery capabilities. SRP is now able to replicate their data for disaster recovery over the same network that is used to conduct business without degrading the performance of business applications or requiring additional bandwidth.

Prior to the implementation of UTG’s solution, a full data backup to tape was taking SRP over 40 hours with their existing technology. UTG implemented a backup procedure that has reduced the backup window to a matter of minutes using NetApp Snapshots. The data can then be written directly to tape from the SAN and no longer has any impact on the production servers.

“The greatest benefit we have received has got to be the replication to the disaster recovery facility, not having to worry about that,” said Kelly Cotton, SRP FCU Technical Manager. “The performance is unbelievable; it has always been off the charts regarding reliability and speed. Because it is so easy to expand the systems implemented, we no longer have a concern about growth. Also, the IT staff was amazed how simple it really was after going to a week of training.”