Virtual Data Center Helps Bank Reduce Costs While Increasing Its Business Agility and Competitive Advantage
HOPKINTON, Mass.: EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that Independent Bank Corporation, a Michigan-based bank holding company with $2.9 billion in assets, deployed EMC and VMware solutions to virtualize, consolidate and streamline its storage and server environments for increased efficiency and flexibility, and to better protect its key data assets.
“Our virtual data center is the first phase of our journey toward private cloud, which will enable us to get even more utilization, agility and efficiency from our IT resources,” said Pete Graves, Independent Bank’s Chief Information Officer. “EMC’s roadmap for integrating EMC and VMware solutions and developing new solutions is continually in line with our strategy to become more efficient and competitive.”
Independent Bank virtualized 70 percent of its server environment with VMware vSphere for its critical applications — including Microsoft SQL Server, corporate email, file systems and its teller database platform. The bank uses EMC CLARiiON® systems to store information from approximately 125 virtual machines and its Microsoft SQL, corporate email, banking and other critical applications, and EMC Centera® to archive images of checks, signatures and other documents. Independent Bank also deployed EMC Data Domain® deduplication storage systems for its backup storage environment, and EMC RecoverPoint and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager to replicate virtual machines and critical application data to a remote site, as well as automate the failover and failback of production systems in the event of any unplanned outages.
The Bank estimates that EMC and VMware solutions have enabled the company to:
- Eliminate 65 physical servers through virtualization and avoid additional physical server expenditures as the environment continues to grow.
- Reduce the time to deploy a physical server from at least a day to 1-2 hours with virtual machines.
- Dramatically reduce server-related power consumption.
- Significantly reduce the bank’s backup storage capacity requirements.
- Reduce the recovery of critical systems from days to a few hours or even minutes.
- Maintain existing staff count as the storage infrastructure grew 40 percent from 8.5 to 12 terabytes over the last 18 months.
“The economic climate has been difficult for banks,” said Graves. “We created a virtual data center with EMC and VMware that is easier and less expensive to maintain while giving us more flexibility to pursue strategic initiatives and extend our competitive advantage. And, we’ll be ready to embrace change and growth as the economy continues to rebound.”
Tom McKowen, Enterprise Architect, Independent Bank, said, “In a virtual world, we’ve seen tremendous savings in time and flexibility when we implement or update our systems. And, because EMC RecoverPoint and VMware are so tightly integrated, we can target different recovery objectives across both our physical and virtual environments and without increasing complexity.”
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world’s leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information.