Case Studies

• BROADWAY BANK

  Sigma helps Broadway Bank earn faster, easy-to-manage data backups with EMC Avamar

  Broadway Bank, a multi-billion dollar financial services organization, has prospered even as the economy and banking industry have struggled. With the tagline, “We’re here for good,” the San Antonio, Texas-based bank has successfully grown its customer base and array of financial products.

  “Our business expansion has caused our IT infrastructure to grow rapidly,” says Bill Meek, Senior Vice President and Information Systems Manager. “In only three years, our server population has grown over 300 percent and we have virtualized approximately 60 percent of our server infrastructure with VMware.”

  As data accumulated rapidly, the bank’s reliance on four different tape backup solutions was making it more difficult to ensure comprehensive data protection.

  “One of our biggest challenges was managing many different backup environments,” says Meek. “Because daily incremental backups could take eight hours or longer, we’d have to overlap our backups or we’d run into business hours… It was difficult to manage, and we were having trouble keeping up with our backups as our data kept growing.”

   

  Solutions

  After evaluating available options, Broadway Bank consolidated its tape-based solutions, including Symantec Backup EXEC software on EMC Avamar backup and recovery software, with integrated global data deduplication, to solve their current and anticipated backup requirements. The bank uses Avamar to perform fast, daily, full agent based backups for physical and VMware virtualized servers across their 38 branch offices, a primary data center and a secondary data center. All data is backed up to Avamar Data Store systems at the primary data center, which are replicated to the bank’s disaster recovery site for additional protection.

  Unlike traditional backup methods, Avamar deduplicates backup data at the source so that only new, unique sub-file data segments are transferred during daily dull backups and stored to disk. Avamar also deduplicates data globally, across virtual and physical environments to reduce the required backed disk storage by up to 50 times.

  Applications protected by Avamar include check imaging, teller management, loan processing, data warehousing, as well as Microsoft SQL databases, Exchange e-mail, Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. Application data and VMware virtual machines are stored on an EMC CLARiiON CX3 storage area network (SAN), which included a gateway to EMC Celerra network-attached storage (NAS). Broadway Bank also uses an Avamar NDMP Accelerator node to back up Celerra, which store documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other files for the bank’s approximately 650 employees. In total, Avamar protects 10 terabytes of data for Broadway Bank.

  “Our experience working with our local EMC reseller, Sigma Solutions was very positive,” adds Meek. “They understood our challenges and backup objectives, and were able to propose a best-in-class solution that fit the bill. We are very satisfied with our partnership with their organization.”

   

  Keeping Pace with Business Growth

  With increased IT flexibility and reliability provided by Avamar and VMware server virtualization, Broadway Bank has kept pace with business growth, while focusing on customer satisfaction and product quality.

  ‘When we used to use tape backup systems, our daily incremental backups and weekly full backups would take many hours to complete,” says Meek. “With Avamar, we get daily full backups in less than an hour across our existing network links with 99.7 percent daily data reduction. Restore quality and speed also improved.”

  Avamar was especially successful within Broadway Bank’s growing VMware environment.

  “VMware has been essential in keeping up with our business growth,” says Mr. Meek. “We have approximately 60 percent of our servers virtualized now, but when we rolled it out, we knew our previous backup solution wasn’t going to keep up. We brought Avamar in because of its integration with VMware, and the backup and restore performance has been outstanding.”

  “We have a single, centrally managed solution for backing everything in our physical and virtual environments – from small branch servers, to file shares, to large databases and replicating it all to another site,” says Bill Rigsby, Vice President and Senior Systems Engineer. “Avamar is a very versatile, comprehensive solution.”

   

  Streamlined Backup Management

  “The solution also addressed our need for superior data security,” says Meek. “Our data is much more secure. We no longer have to worry about tapes getting misplaced. Our management and auditors love that we’ve moved in this direction.”

  The bank is spending significantly less time managing backups since Avamar was deployed.

  “Avamar is a set it and forget it solution,” says Rigsby. “We used to spend 20 to 30 hours weekly babysitting backup jobs, replacing tapes, restarting failed jobs and so on. Now, it is five minutes a day. We’re also now tapeless, so our tape expense has gone away. The overall savings have been huge.”

• CITY OF MISSOURI CITY, TEXAS

  Sigma helps the City of Missouri City utilize virtualization for server consolidation, disaster recovery and a more flexible infrastructure.

  The City of Missouri City, Texas, works hard to provide high-quality services while keeping costs low. Information technology plays a key role in these efforts. The city relies upon its IT infrastructure to support its operations and deliver information and electronic services to nearly 70,000 residents. Yet over time the city’s data centers had become filled with aging and underutilized servers that demanded time-consuming administration and management.

  The “Show Me City” understood that virtualization could help trim this overhead, but needed a partner to help plan and deploy a new virtualized infrastructure. After completing an RFP process, the city selected Sigma Solutions based upon its significant experience delivering robust data center solutions.

  “We were looking to move to a more virtual environment with VMware in order to eliminate some of our physical servers,” said Lathaniel Allen, IT Operations Manager, City of Missouri City. “We were also looking for a more robust SAN solution that would support our foreseeable storage needs. We chose Sigma based upon the references they provided and our overall comfort level with their team. After talking with them, we felt very confident that they could successfully complete this project.”

   

  Showing the Way

  Recognized as one of America’s Best Places to Live by CNN/Money Magazine, the City of Missouri City is located just outside the Houston Beltway, minutes away from downtown. Sigma’s Houston-based team rolled up their sleeves and provided the local expertise the city needed to turn its virtualization vision into reality.

  “The Sigma team was very helpful during the planning phase. We had a general idea of what we wanted to do, but they helped us understand what our options were. We even went to their site and looked at projects they had completed for our customers,” said Allen. “They architected a solution that would achieve our goals, and then implemented everything for us.”

  Sigma helped the city utilize VMware ESX to reduce 40 or 50 physical servers down to three servers running virtual machines. Sigma also implemented an EMC SAN and the VMware View desktop virtualization solution.

  “Sigma’s engineer sat down with us and explained exactly what he was going to do. He didn’t expect us to know anything. He drew everything out on a whiteboard, told us how it was going to work and answered all of our questions. He even allowed my system administrator to hover over him during the implementation,” said Allen.

  “He explained every step, and then left information that we could refer back to. He has been a great resource. We never felt like he was holding back information, or didn’t want to be bothered. It was like he was one of our crew, the way he interacted with us the whole time he was here. The guys wanted us to go through Sigma again for another project because the engineer was so knowledgeable and easy to work with.”

   

  Seeing Real Value

  For its next project, the city asked Sigma to assist with a failover site for disaster recovery. Faced with a variety of natural threats — tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes and even the occasional snowstorm — the city needed to ensure that its systems and data were protected.

  “We wanted to set up a second site that replicated our primary site for redundancy,” Allen said. “We bought some additional VMware licenses and Site Recovery Manager for automated failover. We also bought a second EMC SAN for data replication. The same Sigma engineer came out and installed everything in our second data center in City Hall. It went very smoothly.”

  Allen says virtualization has exceeded the city’s expectations.

  “It has cut down on power and cooling and our physical footprint. My system administrator doesn’t have as many servers to maintain, and we don’t have to worry about replacing hardware should one of those older machines fail,” he said.

  “Desktop virtualization is also going well. We didn’t have much information on that, and were concerned because we have areas with different types of systems. Sigma ran with it and laid the groundwork for us to implement 30 virtual desktops during the first phase. They showed my system administrator how to set everything up and suggested some thin clients. We’re now looking at implementing another 30 licenses in our public safety area and will probably get Sigma’s help expanding this initiative in the future.”

  The “Show Me City” has also been impressed with Sigma Solutions. The city now has a dedicated and experienced partner to help ensure that its IT infrastructure supports the myriad services provided by the local government.

  “We haven’t had any problems with any of the systems they have implemented and installed here,” said Allen. “They’ve been very helpful in coming up with solutions and being available when we need them. They have been the best vendor we have worked with by far.”