Sharonview Federal Credit Union Delighted with Unitrends After Five Great Years of Use

Customer Profile

Headquartered in Fort Mill, SC, Sharonview Federal Credit Union’s motto is: "With us…it’s personal." Sharonview employees work hard every day to fulfill this promise; the goal in every interaction with each member is to make that member feel uniquely special and valued. From humble beginnings as an employer-based credit union in the 1950’s, Sharonview today is a full-service, not-for-profit financial institution with assets of more than $950 million serving more than 59,000 members with twenty-one branches in South Carolina, North Carolina and New Jersey.

An increasing quantity of data, expanded network infrastructure, and an increasingly complex storage environment have accompanied Sharonview’s growth.

Challenges

In 2005, Sharonview CIO Mark Johnson decided it was time to get away from tape backup.

There was no way to fully recover a failed server, even after extensive investment in a new tape library and new tape backup software. Efforts to back up remotely over the WAN had proved unworkable, and even after consolidation to a single tape library, Sharonview’s tape backups were “a hassle” to manage, requiring manual review of logs to determine whether backup jobs were successful.

Reporting was not only cumbersome, it could be inaccurate. Kevin Hughes, Network Engineer, recalls, “I would sometimes see a file in the tape catalog, but then when attempting to recover it would turn out there was a problem, and the file backup was not actually there.” The logistics of finding a specific file version might require browsing the catalogs from several tapes, which could take hours.

In seeking a new solution with better speed and reliability, in 2005 Sharonview wanted to improve their disaster recovery readiness, even as they consolidated all branch location servers to a new state-of-the-art data center in Fort Mill, SC.

Many servers ran 24/7, and members expected the ability to perform transactions online, so there was not a “down” period for backups. They wanted whole system protection and the ability to vault copies of backups to a remote location without impeding WAN performance for core business processes. Being a financial institution, Sharonview required that backups be easily encrypted. Looking at all the requirements, Johnson said, “I knew we could not get something like that with tape.”

Benefits

In early 2006, following a period of evaluation, Sharonview purchased a Unitrends DPU5000 and DPV3000 to protect approximately 1 TB of systems content.

Delighted with the improvement over their tape backup system, having successfully depended on Unitrends technology for almost five years, in 2009 Sharonview made a second major investment in Unitrends technology, upgrading to the newest generation of Unitrends hardware.

Interestingly, Sharonview did not evaluate any other vendors’ solutions. Johnson explains, “In the past year we had to make a decision as to whether to stay with Unitrends. We didn't even look anywhere else - we were happy with the Unitrends product.”

Johnson explained that after five years, Sharonview had more than outgrown the original Unitrends appliances. A new SAN and increased amounts of data had stretched the backup window to twelve hours.

Sharonview upgraded to three Unitrends appliances that have cut the backup window in half.

Today, Sharonview uses Unitrends to backup a SAN and individual servers and vault data to another location. They also use the baremetal recovery feature for whole system protection, and the included Unitrends Exchange Agent for protection of their email system. Backups are encrypted with InCrypt 256-AES encryption, delivering the integrated security required by this member-focused, and highly successful financial institution.

Sharonview is especially impressed with the Unitrends support organization. Johnson remarks, “When Kevin calls for support, they treat him like he knows what the heck he’s doing. He wouldn’t be calling them if he didn’t need help. They always give us the level of attention we feel we deserve.”

Mark Johnson,
Chief Information Officer

"We knew as we kept growing that we were going to need a much more robust solution than we could get with tape…We were probably one of the early adopters of Unitrends. Now after five years we are completely satisfied"

"When it was time to expand after five years, we didn't even look anywhere else - we were happy with the Unitrends product."

"The main question in my mind is, “Is it reliable?” and the answer is yes, it is."

Kevin Hughes, Network Engineer

"When we migrated from tape to Unitrends five years ago we cut our backup way down, then cut it in half again when we upgraded to the latest Unitrends hardware earlier this year."

"We invested in a SAN earlier this year, and are using the Unitrends product to back up individual servers as well as our (new) SAN.”

"The speed at which we can restore files, and the reliability of the backups are the best features."

"Support’s always been great, they’re very quick to respond, and they always follow through."

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Success Story: Sharonview Federal Credit Union Delighted with Unitrends After Five Great Years of Use