Case Study: Ventura County Credit Union
Ventura County Credit Union Gets Fast, Reliable Data Protection for Physical and Virtual Environments
In more than a half-century of service, Ventura County Credit Union (VCCU) has grown to become the county’s largest local credit union. Its member base has expanded beyond the Credit Union’s roots to include members from neighboring Santa Barbara County, along the California coast. VCCU now boasts nearly 50,000 people in its family, with more than $475 million in assets, offices in five cities and an extended network of ATMs. The Credit Union attributes its success to a combination of dedicated, personal attention and a comprehensive range of services—such as free online banking and bill pay—that rivals those from the largest financial institutions.
Goals
As the Credit Union grew, the data growth accelerated and the infrastructure became more complex. It became apparent VCCU needed a solution which included the need to implement virtualization as a way to improve disaster recovery (DR) preparedness, boost utilization efficiency and control maintenance and server deployment costs.
Fortunately the VCCU team had already been working with Btech, a Managed Security Service Provider, on network security and regulatory compliance issues including the need for DR. When VCCU expressed its backup concerns, Btech’s Lee Bird recognized that EVault™ Software from EVault™, A Seagate Company, could potentially fill all their data protection gaps. Bird encouraged VCCU to give EVault Software a try. The Credit Union hoped it would help them:
- Streamline backups and ensure remote protection and end-to-end encryption of data from its Symitar Episys core credit union system and other business critical systems
- Reduce backup windows and simplify and accelerate restores
- Make it easy to back up and restore data for VMware-based virtual environments
- Reduce costs and the staff devoted to data protection
- Comply with National Credit Union (NCUA) audit best practices for data protection and DR
Challenges
VCCU’s data set had grown, and this sheer size created long nightly backups. Recovering data quickly had also become a need. Creating a secure, reliable means to back up and restore VCCU’s physical and virtual servers—most critical being its Symitar Episys core processing system was key to the IT solution. All business critical components of that mix needed appropriate backupand- restore provisions to ensure satisfying regulatory mandates for privacy, security and retention.
DR was a critical need as well. The Credit Union had to create a bulletproof system for replicating data to a location far enough offsite that a natural disaster could be ridden out with minimal of business disruption (VCCU’s offices reside within California’s earthquake fault zones). Regulatory mandates for privacy made it essential that remote backups be encrypted in transit as well as in storage. The ideal system would transmit data over the wire, eliminating the security problems inherent in the physical transport required by tape-based DR schemes. To deliver controlled expenses, any new data protection solution would have to be cost-effective and serve to reduce the resources allocated to data protection.
Solutions
On Btech’s recommendation, VCCU chose a data protection solution incorporating EVault Software. They especially appreciated that Btech was a credit union specialist, which made creating a perfect-fit system nearly a seamless process. Btech quickly installed the system, including software, a main vault and secondary off-site vault for DR purposes and more than a dozen agents and plug-ins to cover VCCU’s Windows environment, VMware implementations, Exchange and SQL servers, and Symitar data.
Results
The EVault solution has had a dramatic impact, especially noticeable in the time required to get data backed up and restored. EVault’s block-level, changes-only technology makes a huge difference: “Now, the full nightly backups of our Symitar Episys production database average less than five minutes to run,” says Carol Harris, CEO/President. VCCU’s critical systems, including Symitar’s Episys and VMware-based applications, are now backed up not only to a primary vault at corporate headquarters, but are also sent offsite to their DR site through the use of EVault Replication and EVault DualVault add-on products. This provides VCCU with assurance data can be recovered in the case of disaster and helps to satisfy internal governance and service level policies. The entire solution is documented in regular reports, which makes it easy for VCCU to pass its regulatory audits.
EVault Software, with its Web CentralControl, makes every aspect of administering data protection easy. The solution has created a high level of confidence, so much so that VCCU recently agreed to begin tests of EVault’s new EVault System Restore product, which enables complete, fully provisioned “bare metal” restores of Windows systems in minutes. The Credit Union reports that they also gets excellent support, working with Btech or, as appropriate, with EVault’s expert in-house techs.
