Case Studies
SRP Federal Credit Union
THE CLIENT: Since its inception in 1960, the SRP Federal Credit Union has been serving its members in and around the North Augusta, South Carolina area with exceptional financial products. Their products and services always offer competitive rates while they meet members’ financial needs and make their dreams a reality. SRP has 350 full time employees with a main office, 20 branch offices, an admin center and a disaster recovery bunker.
THE CHALLENGE: SRP was planning out the data center in their new corporate administration center as well as a fully redundant disaster recover bunker. In order to make this project a success, UTG helped SRP evaluate solutions for servers, networking, security, storage and telephony. Exhaustive comparisons were conducted to ensure that SRP would have a secure, cost effective solution that would meet all functional requirements. Additionally, the entire solution had to support the redundancy of the disaster recovery plans.
SRP had distributed storage that had become unwieldy and the fragmented nature of local storage was driving the efficiency of investment down. Additionally, the backup windows of their critical data were growing beyond the acceptable limits. Finally, when planning for replication to the DR facility, there was no clean way to replicate the data with their existing server architecture.
THE SOLUTION: UTG compiled a very detailed needs analysis and proposal based on SRP’s plans and technology vision and generated a comprehensive best of breed solution. SRP’s final selections included technologies from industry leading vendors based on the exceptional engineering and value. Because Information Technology is so foundational to daily operations, SRP was very excited that the new infrastructure would literally meet every requirement, provide greatly improved performance and was a cost effective solution.
UTG helped SRP to migrate their current infrastructure to a blade server solution leveraging 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 SAN that would be used for DR in the off-site data center. Replication was tuned to meet SRP’s recover point objectives and network conditions so that SRP could get back to serving their members quickly in the event of a disaster.
UTG implemented resiliency features of SRP’s telephony systems to ensure that members could continue to reach the credit union via telephone, even in the event of a disaster. Redunancy was provided for all critical telephony functions such as inbound calls, telephone banking applications, voicemail and the call center.
UTG was also able to resolve many of the backup challenges facing SRP with the new solution. Industry leading point-in-time copy technology allowed 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.
THE RESULT: The new IT architecture greatly facilitated what threatened to be a very difficult move. The network now securely provides a higher level of performance and instantly created an enterprise-class disaster recovery capability for their network, data, applications and telephony
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. 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 DR facility, not having to worry about that. 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.”
–Kelly Cotton, Technical Manager
