For financial institutions, business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) are critical and complex IT functions. Their applications are often responsible for investing, trading and providing financial services for thousands of customers, and unexpected datacenter downtime can lead to millions of dollars in lost revenue. By choosing an easy-to-use, comprehensive disaster recovery solution from Zerto, a number of large financial institutions, including HAPO Community Credit Union, Foresight Financial Group and the Security Service Federal Credit Union (SSFCU) have been able to cost-effectively automate data replication and recovery, and experience other, business-changing benefits as a result. The deployment of Zerto technology makes the process of getting back up and running following a disaster of any kind quick, easy and painless – with minimal impact on essential business operations and more streamlined datacenter management.
Zerto offers a virtual-aware BC/DR solution – Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) – which replicates data within the virtual infrastructure instead of in physical storage. By moving replication to the hypervisor, companies extend the benefits of virtualization, including flexibility, mobility and scalability, to their disaster recovery solutions. Zerto’s hypervisor-based replication combines the enterprise-class features of physical replication with the flexibility, ease- of-management and control, and scalability of virtual environments.
“Financial institutions simply cannot afford to have any downtime,” said Ziv Kedem, CEO, Zerto, Inc. “We are proud to be trusted by many financial services companies for disaster recovery. By providing them with powerful recovery that is easier to use than traditional DR offerings, we’re able to help ensure that they have peace of mind about their data and are able to continue to provide their customers with excellent, reliable service and financial guidance. In the words of one customer, ‘now I can sleep at night.’”
HAPO Reduces Storage Capacity Requirements by 43 Percent
HAPO Community Credit Union is located in Southeast Washington. Prior to implementing ZVR, the company was using 70 TB of storage at its replication site for array-based replication. HAPO needed to protect 130 virtual machines (VMs) and had a recovery point objective (RPO) of 24 hours. With ZVR implemented, the organization now uses only 40 TB of storage and has freed up 30 TB, which is standing by to accommodate future growth. Overall, HAPO realized a storage savings of 43 percent, while improving replication performance – with RPO of just seconds and recovery time objective (RTO) of 5 minutes. The significant storage savings and improved RPO and RTO allow HAPO to save on both money and time in all areas of its information technology operations, while fully protecting all VMs.
“When we purchased the software, we knew it would improve our BC/DR process, but we got so much more,” said Bill Rausch, Software Engineering Manager, HAPO Community Credit Union. “We reduced our storage footprint by more than 40 percent, which we never expected. Now, we don’t have to purchase storage for the foreseeable future, which is a huge savings for us.”
Foresight Achieves Ambitious Recovery Goals with Minimal DR Budget
Foresight Financial Group supports community banks and owns five different banking institutions that need to be supported by Foresight’s IT infrastructure. With its primary site in Illinois and a replication site in Wisconsin, the organization needed to ensure data protection and compliance with financial regulations across all locations, including the protection of critical applications such as Microsoft SQL and Exchange. With a minimal DR budget and a goal of zero data loss, Foresight chose ZVR, because it allowed the company to function without a remote SAN. Foresight is now experiencing significantly improved RTO and, as an added benefit, is now able to more efficiently document its DR process, which is required as part of the company’s internal operational guidelines. The deployment of ZVR was quick and easy, and employees are able to focus on expanding and improving other IT operations on a daily basis, instead of replication.
“We’ve been so pleased with our disaster recovery strategy now that we’ve installed Zerto Virtual Replication,” said Andrew LaPour, AVP, Network Operations of Foresight Financial. “ZVR has changed our BC/DR efforts to be streamlined, reliable and less time-consuming such that we’re able to be consistently and continually relied upon by our community banks and their customers.”
400 VMs Protected at SSFCU
The Security Service Federal Credit Union (SSFCU) has $7 billion in assets with corporate headquarters located in San Antonio, Texas. The company was looking for a new BC/DR strategy that would protect several mission-critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange and Oracle, across multiple locations. SSFCU also needed to protect 400 VMs and wanted to improve its RTO. SSFCU chose ZVR because of its ability to work with any storage hardware and its flexible management options. Following the implementation of ZVR, SSFCU is now experiencing 60 percent faster RTO as well as an unexpected improvement in reporting and notification, all while fully protecting and supporting its virtualized IT infrastructure.
“We need to ensure the rapid recovery of our key applications, specifically, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle. Zerto Virtual Replication delivers the aggressive service levels we need with the ability to failover to any point in time with a virtual aware solution. ZVR supports the virtual environment while enhancing our investment in virtualization,” said Richard Polchlopek, Enterprise System Engineer, SSFCU.