Community Bank Case Study

Alliance Member: CentriNet

Customer: Community Bank

 

ABOUT THE CUSTOMER

 

Our customer is a large community bank based in northeast Georgia. Through its subsidiaries, they provide a full range of community banking services to individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, real estate developers, contractors and farmers. They also operate under affiliates in the region and offer full-service banking offices throughout North Georgia

 

THE CHALLENGE

 

Our customer was experiencing difficulty conforming to industry regulations governing the safe, secure backup of their data. In addition, because of the sensitive nature of the industry and the data involved, they wanted to build a fault tolerant, easily recoverable secondary site for Disaster Recovery and business continuity. 

 

As is the case with most businesses in today’s world, budgets, functionality, timing and manpower were all of critical importance to the success of the project.

 

THE SOLUTION

 

CentriNet carefully considered all aspects of the business in assisting with a DR plan that would encompass all of their goals, including functionality, acceptable risk and downtime, leveraging of existing systems, and easy resumption of business tasks in the event of an emergency.

 

After a comprehensive on site assessment which included discovery sessions with business owners, application owners, IT personnel and executives, we architected a solution that accomplished all of our customer’s goals, and leveraged a large portion of their existing infrastructure.   By doing this, budgets were kept in check and equipment costs were kept to a minimum, while still offering a robust, scalable Disaster Recovery Plan. 

 

Our basic solution consists of replication at the EqualLogic iSCSI SAN level for the replication of systems (production) to the disaster recovery site systems. Equallogic provides block level replication of data from the source volumes (production) to the target volumes (disaster recovery). CentriNet also recommended incorporating our client’s existing VMWare ESX Server a part of their disaster recovery solution. VMWare ESX Server allows multiple instances of the same or different operating systems to run simultaneously on one (1) physical hardware server device. This increases the number of systems which may be included in the disaster recovery site while reducing the number of physical servers required.

 

Today, our customer is able to focus on their core business activities, knowing that their data is safe, backed up, and current. Our solution requires minimal intervention and tests have shown the plan to be solid and reliable. 

 

By using our best of breed solutions, experienced professionals in the Disaster Recovery Field, and quality engineering services, along with collaboration and input from our customer, this bank has added an important tool to their arsenal for capturing and retaining good clients. They are able to provide excellent service to their customers , knowing their data is safe and reliable, and that they’ve done the appropriate planning for the unexpected.