Regional Credit Union Relies on Unitrends for Reliable Data Access and Disaster Recovery

 

The Challenges

360 Federal Credit Union needs to protect the financial information of more than 17,000 members, ensuring that mission-critical member data is recoverable in case of system failure or a regional disaster. An efficient disaster recovery strategy was needed to ensure the credit union could quickly restore services to its members as timely access to financial information is vital for its business. Otherwise, the credit union risked losing members to larger banks.

The Solution

Working with its system integrator, Whalley Computer Associates, 360 Federal Credit Union deployed a disaster recovery solution from Unitrends. By efficiently backing up mission-critical member data locally to disk and then migrating that data off-site to a remote disaster recovery facility, the credit union is able to reliably safeguard its member information and ensure the quick recovery of that data if necessary.

360 Federal Credit Union (360FCU) is a not-for-profit financial institution in northern Connecticut serving more than 17,000 members with more than $183 million in assets. It runs on a co-op model, reinvesting deposits in its members, ensuring that everyone has access to the financial services they need to live day-to-day as well as loans for home improvements, education, medical expenses and small business opportunities.

Given the importance to the community, it is vital that members have 24x7 access to the credit union’s brick and mortar or online services. Any outage—whether it was a single server that failed or the entire data center—would seriously impede availability of these banking services, leaving people without access to their financial information. The financial services industry is highly competitive. Without the guarantee of fast and reliable access to member’s data, the organization risked losing members to larger national banks with enterprise-class IT systems.

However, 360FCU was relying on an out-dated, inefficient and cumbersome disaster recovery solution. The software a commonly deployed tape-based solution that required the credit union’s IT staff to manually load and off-load tapes and hope that the system wouldn’t fail in the middle of the night, leaving an entire day’s worth of data unprotected. The unreliability and complexity of the tape solution didn’t instill confidence that the credit union would be able to quickly recover lost files in case of system failure or a wide-spread data center outage.

“While the backups were time-consuming and cumbersome, it was really the recoveries that caused many sleepless nights,” said Jackie Miller, vice president of technology, 360 Federal Credit Union. “As a tape-based solution that required off-site storage, we would have to first drive to a warehouse, find the appropriate tape in the catalogue, drive it back to the data center and search the tape for the right file. Then it would take several more hours to recover the data, restore the failed server from scratch and reconfigure everything. If we had to do that for all of our data, it would have taken weeks and the credit union would have been in trouble.”

Efficient, Reliable Disk Backups

360FCU replaced its tape-base solution with a Unitrends disk backup solution, giving the organization a single tool with which to effectively manage an efficient and reliable disaster recovery strategy. The solution includes a Data Protection Unit (DPU) to conduct daily and weekly backups locally and a Data Protection Vault (DPV) for weekly data migrations off-site to a remote disaster recovery facility.

“Unitrends allows us to restore a server to any hardware regardless of brand or model number in about an hour. That’s a huge advantage when striving to maintain business continuity of our financial services.” -- Jackie Miller, Vice President of Technology, 360 Federal Credit Union

The deployment of the new Unitrends disaster recovery solution was managed by Whalley Computer Associates (WCA)—a full-service system integrator in Massachusetts and part of the Venturetech Network. One of Unitrends original resellers and its largest reseller in the Northeast, WCA has been recommending Unitrends products since the inception of the company’s DPU offering. A team of WCA engineers met with Miller and her staff to implement a basic needs analysis, making sure IT fully understood the company’s requirements for business continuity and system performance. The WCA team then helped 360FCU plan, deploy and configure the solution.

“Unitrends is our disaster recovery provider of choice for mission-critical environments similar to 360 Federal Credit Union, but we wanted to do due diligence and make sure we were meeting all their performance and availability requirements,” said Jack Poudrier, senior network engineer, Whalley Computer Associates. “We then conducted some training sessions so they were able to manage the solution in-house to maximize its efficiencies.”

The Unitrends solution backs up eight Windows 2003 HP ProLiant DL servers, two Linux servers and a UNIX system — all totaling 1.3 TB of data. However, through powerful incremental technology that eliminates redundant data from being backed up more than once, the solution only has to send 154 GB of data over the system for each incremental backup, taking less than five hours each night. Previously, the tape-based solution could only back up 13 GB of data in the same amount of time. For compliance and security reasons, the credit union also conducts a full backup of its 35-Gb SQL database each night—a process that now takes less than 15 minutes.

“The Unitrends solution has been an absolute life saver,” Miller said. “We are able to reliably back up our file data and the mission-critical SQL database each night. In addition, the backups are done in real-time without affecting the availability or performance of the credit union’s online banking services.”

Ensuring Reliable, Robust Business Continuity

360FCU can now trust that its data is reliably backed up and that it can easily be recovered in the event of loss, making sure that members have 24x7 access to the credit union’s financial services. The efficient backups and recoveries made possible by the Unitrends solution help keep 360FCU’s IT systems highly competitive with those of its larger competitors, enabling a reliable and robust business continuity and compliance strategy on par with more expensive and complex enterprise solutions.

For file recoveries, Miller simply has to sign into the Unitrends Rapid Recovery Console, drill down into the appropriate server and locate the specific folder, file or group of files. She can then push the file back to the original system or to another machine. The entire process takes just a few minutes and can be done from her desk.

For more widespread data loss due to a fire, flood or regional disaster, the credit union can quickly and completely rebuild failed systems through the Unitrends BareMetal restore feature. When a server is completely unrecoverable, an administrator can restore the operating system, network and storage configuration, installed applications, drivers and user settings to another server—regardless of whether it is the same brand or model number.

“The process to completely restore a server used to take weeks since we likely would have had to order the exact same model number and have it shipped to our data center,” Jackie said. “Unitrends, on the other hand, allows us to restore to any hardware regardless of brand or model number in about an hour. That’s a huge advantage when trying to maintain business continuity of our financial services.”

The Unitrends solution has also paid off in regards to the budget, enabling 360FCU to eliminate nearly $3,000 in tape costs per year. The company has also been able to cut down on courier trips to the archive site since data is automatically migrated over the company’s WAN to a secure disaster recovery facility.

Key Benefits