Arizona Credit Union Drops Tape for EVault Backup Appliances

May 17, 2011 Alex Woodie

Desert Schools Federal Credit Union slashed its IBM i server backup times by more than 90 percent and its X64 server backup times by about 80 percent as a result of the implementation of i365‘s EVault Plug-n-Protect backup and recovery appliances, the IT vendor announced last week. The Phoenix-based credit union made the move to the EVault disk- and cloud-based backup solution after it determined tape backups could no longer adequately protect its 400-server environment.

Desert Schools Federal Credit Union provides banking and financial services to about 370,000 Arizonans through more than 50 branches in Gila, Maricopa, and Pinal counties. With assets of about $3.2 billion, the non-profit organization is the 24th largest credit union in the country. It’s been in business for more than 70 years.

Prior to adopting EVault, the credit union used a combination of tape backup and third-party encryption technologies to protect about 12 TB of confidential financial data. This data was spread across 392 servers running IBM i, VMware, and Windows environments. However, the backup routines failed to meet the credit union’s recovery time objective (RTO). This set the organization on a course of violating compliance requirements set forth by the National Credit Union Association, i365 said.

The solution recommended by Desert Schools’ local IT solutions provider, 3RP, was to install the EVault Plug-n-Protect appliance, which i365 launched about two years ago. The Windows-based appliances feature SATA drives manufactured by i365’s corporate parent, Seagate Technology. The appliances, which can house from 3 TB to 12 TB each of RAID 5-protected storage, work with locally installed EVault agents to back up data from target platforms. They also work with the EVault Cloud to provide a hybrid backup solution that includes off-site data protection.

Backup times fell dramatically following the EVault implementation. It previously took 37 hours to back up the credit union’s core IBM i-based banking application, Fiserv Signature. Following the installation, it took three hours. Backup times for X64 systems dropped from 17 hours to about 3.5 hours, i365 said. What’s more, the move freed up the IT department’s time by more than 25 hours a month.

“We knew EVault was the best choice for Desert Schools, offering total reliability for data backup, native deduplication, AES encryption, delta-level replication, and bare metal recovery for all applications,” 3RP’s solutions architect Scott Mellegaard states in a press release.