BancMidwest Services Invests in Green Future with Compellent SAN
In the competitive banking industry, Minnesota-based BancMidwest Services Corporation, a subsidiary of Mainstreet Bank, found success by combining old-fashioned personal service with the convenience and availability of modern technologies. Individual customers at Mainstreet Bank can access account histories, view check images and pay bills at any time of day. Business accounts can leverage the bank’s unique cash-management solution, eCorp, to access account information, manage funds and transactions and originate ACH transfers.
For Mainstreet Bank, providing this level of robust customer service with a small-town personality meant shifting from a typical technology mindset. “We always evaluate the overall impact for the customer first,” says Brian Priebe, IT manager, BancMidwest Services Corp., a subsidiary of Mainstreet Bank.
To provide customers with secure and reliable access to their accounts, the IT group at BancMidwest Services needed to improve its business continuity strategy and update the bank’s data infrastructure. The previous configuration with direct-attached server storage was becoming increasingly cumbersome to maintain and more difficult to keep online.
“When you’re trying to enhance the customer experience, downtime is simply unacceptable,” says Priebe. “We needed a way to help ensure that our customers would not encounter any system outages.”
A data center upgrade provided a natural opportunity to implement a more economical and eco-friendly solution that could decrease the power, cooling and floor space costs. “BancMidwest Services has a strong commitment to environmentally responsible technology,” says Priebe. “We also see the immediate cost benefits of going green.”
After evaluating other options, BancMidwest Services IT group decided the Compellent Storage Center™ storage area network (SAN) and its Enterprise Manager software had the reliability and security the bank needed with the green features they desired. The IT group deployed two controllers in its primary SAN, with storage capacity spread over a mix of disk drive types in multiple tiers, and a secondary SAN in a remote site.
Storage is the Foundation for a Virtualization
Virtualization paves the path to a more economical data center by consolidating resources. Priebe realized that Compellent’s advanced storage virtualization was an important primer to successful server virtualization.
“You can’t run a virtual server infrastructure without a virtual SAN infrastructure,” says Priebe. “By using a Compellent SAN in conjunction with virtualized servers, we can capitalize on key features such as booting from the SAN, which will help us minimize system downtime.”
Compellent’s storage virtualization amplifies server virtualization to maximize existing data center assets. Compellent eases storage provisioning, automatically migrates data to the appropriate tier and increases data protection by creating a flexible pool of storage resources.
With the administrative time saved by virtualizing both servers and storage, the IT group can take on projects that contribute directly to the customer experience. The team expects it will now be able to deploy new applications much more quickly. “It used to take us one to two months to launch new applications or customer services,” says Priebe. “With a virtualized infrastructure, we will be able to launch new applications in 15 minutes.”
Virtualization with the Compellent SAN helps BancMidwest Services achieve its green goals. “The SAN is an important step towards reducing our power, cooling and real estate costs and decreasing the carbon emissions from our data center,” says Priebe.
Reporting Eases Management, Informs Decisions
Compellent’s Enterprise Manager reporting software makes it easy for the IT team to translate the benefits of virtualization and other innovative storage technology into actual cost savings. “Enterprise Manager is intuitive. The program makes it easy to report to my technology committee every quarter on the savings we’ve achieved,” says Priebe
The IT group can measure power and carbon emissions savings easily using the power Savings Report in Enterprise Manager. “Enterprise Manager’s power savings report shows us how many kilowatt hours we will save with the Compellent SAN as compared with a typical storage system—it’s brilliant,” says Priebe.
With the storage-based chargeback features in Enterprise Manager, the bank’s IT group can also track how branches and business units are using the Compellent SAN. “The chargeback feature lets us put a dollar amount on each group that uses the SAN,” says Priebe. “It’s gives us greater understanding and control of our infrastructure costs.”
Replication Provides Affordable Business Continuity
The Compellent SAN helps the bank’s IT group reduce system downtime and increase data security so it can continue to enhance the customer experience. Compellent’s Data Instant Replay™ creates space-efficient snapshots, called Replays, to provide extremely fast recovery from any type of data hazard.
“With our old infrastructure, it might take a day to recover data from an optical DVD. Now it takes about 15 seconds. It’s an amazingly simple process that will ultimately benefit the bank’s customers by providing better availability to data.”
BancMidwest Services also replicates data to a disaster recovery site using Remote Instant Replay™, which replicates continuous Replays between the local and remote sites. Because Compellent sends only block-level changes in data, the IT group can achieve the availability customers require at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. “Bandwidth costs money,” says Priebe. “Replicating between the two SANs at the block level saves us significant costs on bandwidth alone. Using Compellent is the only way we can afford to achieve business continuity.”
Ultimately, moving to the Compellent SAN will play a key role in enhancing the customer experience. “By providing faster, more reliable access to account information, the Compellent SAN will help us move forward with new services that will differentiate our bank from the competition.” says Priebe.