BETTER BACKUPS TOP LIST OF BENEFITS FROM NEW SAN

ORGANIZATION: Achieva Credit Union

LOCATION: Dunedin, Fla.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 290-plus

TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT TEAM: 12

HISTORY: Founded in 1937 with less than $100, Achieva is a five-star credit union with more than $1 billion in assets, 102,000 members and 19 branches in several counties along Florida’s Central Gulf Coast. The full-service banking and financial services institution realized $8.9 million in net income in 2013.

At a Glance

Achieva Credit Union’s new NetApp SAN sits at the cornerstone of the institution’s innovation.

Felipe Garcia says the ability to perform VDI and storage workloads within one system cuts crucial administration time.

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IT departments always strive to avoid downtime of

mission-critical applications by incorporating robust

infrastructure based on enterprise hardware. At Dunedin,

Fla.-based Achieva Credit Union, an unplanned outage led

to a stronger storage environment, thanks to investment

in a more solid product that now serves as a solid foundation

for the institution’s growth.

The financial institution’s 12-member IT team has a

can-do, hands-on attitude, and for several years focused

on virtualizing the computing environment, including

implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In 2009,

the team took early steps toward realizing that vision by

installing an entry-level storage area network (SAN). The

scale-out platform had a low entry purchase price that

included all needed add-on features and was relatively easy

to operate and manage, says Felipe Garcia, senior network

administrator at Achieva. This particular scalability model

required an ongoing financial outlay, however: As the credit

union grew and upgraded to more robust versions of Microsoft

Exchange, SQL Server and its home banking application, the

institution had to spend more on storage capacity.

As Achieva’s demands grew, the institution’s older

solution also began showing performance limitations that

adversely affected IT’s ability to replicate data to DR. The

way the previous SAN tracked changes during snapshot

replications was “very inefficient,” Garcia says, and “we

couldn’t send everything over to our disaster recovery

colocation site.”

His team also had to endure the difficult task of picking

and choosing what among applications and datasets

should be sent to the replication site — a less than optimal

scenario when it comes to averting risk. Achieva relied on

other backup and recovery technologies to send copies to

DR, which protected the active servers, but restoring from

those backups required much more time than native SAN

replication technology.

In August 2013, Achieva’s SAN sustained a very rare

double disk failure, which forced the credit union to roll over

some applications to the disaster recovery site. This served

as an impromptu disaster recovery test, and brought to

light the deficiencies of the old SAN. “Since we weren’t able

to have that real-time synchronized replication for every

application and piece of data, we were forced to have to

go to the auxiliary backup systems, which involve lengthy

restore times,” Garcia says. “The process of waiting for

backups to restore made us question why we were utilizing

a SAN that didn’t offer more flexibility in replicating the entire

environment or provide the best data protection. It was time

to start looking for a better system.”

A Chance for Big ChangeAchieva’s IT team members recognized that they needed

to find a better way to replicate their data on the production

storage system, and further enhance their ability to withstand

the inevitable drive failures inherent to spinning disk-based

systems. They were eager to consider a new — potentially

better — direction.

“If we’re going to do a big forklift upgrade, why be married to

a vendor just because that relationship is there?” Garcia recalls.

He and his team took the opportunity to examine all of

their options, which led to a frank, in-depth discussion with

representatives from CDW, with whom they enjoyed an

existing partnership.

“We went in just trying to understand what their

struggles were, to start to determine what would be the

absolute best fit for their specific requirements,” says Ryan

Hand, one of CDW’s inside account

executives who attended the first

meeting with Achieva, along with

CDW Solution Architect Jim Dacey.

“We probably spent 90 minutes that

first day talking about storage, talking

about the problems they were having,

the faults in their current environment,

what they would like to have. Slowly

but steadily, it moved from fixing one specific issue to a

complete replacement of the SAN,” Hand says.

From there, the conversation turned to solutions: “The

more we talked about it, and the more we started talking

about integrating snapshots into a backup or rollback plan

for them, the more NetApp started to come to the fore.”

NetApp represented Achieva’s ideal choice because it

aligned with the institution’s most critical requirements.

Garcia and his team needed a storage environment that

offered the strongest possible data protection, efficient

replication, a caching solution and super-tight integration

with VMware. The solution had to rely on the iSCSI IP-

based SAN standard, and provide the same 10-gigabyte

connectivity in place with the existing SAN.

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“We don’t have the luxury of having a specialist administer only the SAN or the VMware or the application server.”— Felipe Garcia, Senior Network Administrator, Achieva Credit Union

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Ease of use also ranked high on the list of requirements.

As Achieva’s IT team contemplated a new solution, Garcia

says he worried that an enterprise-grade, unified storage

environment might require some staff members to work

exclusively on storage, upsetting his department’s culture.

While his team is small, each member is very hands-on and

cross-trained in a variety of skills.

“We have to be able to wear many hats,” Garcia says. “We

don’t have the luxury of having a specialist administer only

the SAN or the VMware or the application server. The new

product needed to be something that was feature-rich but

also something that cross-skilled individuals could work on

and manage.”

The NetApp solution met all of those needs and more,

Dacey says, including the double-disk failure protection that

Achieva was forced to go without on the previous solution.

It would allow Achieva’s IT team to manage the storage

space assigned to VMware from a single console without

flipping back and forth between different interfaces, and

also offered a flexible point-in-time snapshot technology

that didn’t require additional software or disk space for

managing and storing snapshots.

Going Head to HeadGarcia was intrigued by NetApp’s capabilities but also

committed to ensuring he and his team conducted an

exhaustive examination of all storage solutions on the

market. They researched the latest solutions offered by

many top vendors as well as some smaller companies.

Achieva invited representatives from the companies that

seemed to best fit their requirements into a kind of head-

to-head SAN competition, ultimately providing an apples-

to-apples comparison.

The exercise was useful but also threatened to lead to

“analysis paralysis,” Garcia says. “It does become a bit of a

challenge, as the point person who gets all the information,

trying to digest it all.”

CDW’s team helped him work through the noise by

providing clarity on just how the NetApp solution worked

and why it represented the best fit. CDW’s experts

explained both sides of the picture, but also were “willing to

get into nitty-gritty tech details with me and other people

on our team as far as what NetApp does and the things that

were important to us — replication and storage efficiency,”

Garcia says, noting that CDW also addressed Achieva’s

more specific fears of another outage and how NetApp

would perform in that type of scenario.

In the end, Garcia and his team went with NetApp

because it stood out as the superior product.

Achieva Credit Union’s IT team made the most of a bad situation and came out ahead by following their typically hands-on style:

• Seize the day. When Achieva’s backup system failed, the financial

institution’s current storage vendor was at the ready with a quick and

easily integrated upgrade, but senior network administrator Felipe

Garcia decided to forgo expediency. Instead, he took the time to

determine what other solutions were available and whether they fit his

organization better.

• Keep an open mind. Initially, Achieva’s IT team was set on finding the

optimal replacement for the storage area network. After meeting with

CDW Solution Architect Jim Dacey and Inside Account Executive Ryan

Hand and listening to their recommendations (for one, Achieva was ripe

for a larger storage environment), Garcia decided to push for added

funding for a new SAN.

• Do the homework. After reviewing proposals from several vendors,

Garcia and other Achieva officials agreed the NetApp solution was

the best choice for their requirements. Still, the team sought solid

evidence to support their decision. They read technical documentation

and visited other financial institutions to see NetApp solutions at work

and participated in product demonstrations.

• Stay involved. CDW Senior Engineer Joel Nordsving implemented the

new solution in short order, but Garcia and his team didn’t wait until it

was complete to begin learning about its operation. The team asked

questions, watched and listened — without getting in the way — and hit

the ground running as soon as the new SAN was in place.

The Way Forward

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“What made NetApp most appealing to us was the

maturity of the platform, the ecosystem of support out

there and the fact that it’s been around for a long time,”

he says. Everything “made us feel like we could do things

more efficiently, especially with the VMware piece. That’s

where we spend a large part of our day.”

Achieva initially planned to implement a NetApp

solution from the 3000 series, but just after making that

decision, the newer 8000 series was released, offering

more processing capacity and memory than the previous

version. “Most customers are uncomfortable being the

first to try a brand-new product, but I had lunch with Felipe

one day and he was anxious to try it out,” Dacey recalls.

A Rock-Solid PlatformCDW Senior Engineer Joel Nordsving moved quickly to

implement the NetApp FAS8020 solution, completing

the task in only five days. Everything went smoothly

and without much fanfare, but Garcia and his team — in

keeping with their hands-on style — were much more

involved than most customers.

“I think they have a much greater understanding of what

goes into the configuration now and how it all works,”

Nordvsing says.

The team’s bent toward “self-sufficiency,” as Garcia

characterizes it, enabled Achieva to enjoy an easy

transition to the new SAN, and excellent results.

So far, Achieva has not experienced any downtime, and the

IT team can now keep more backup copies and deploy new

servers quickly. The institution’s 400-seat VDI deployment

now runs on a NetApp Common Internet File System, which

“can put a lot of strain on a SAN,” Garcia admits, but the new

79% Percentage of IT managers who say that managing storage growth is their greatest challenge**SOURCE: EMC.com “Managing Storage : Trends, Challenges and Options (2013-2014),” 2013

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solution handles it easily. Employees no longer experience

frustrating file lock or latency issues, desktop sign-in times

have improved dramatically, and applications and data are

transferred to desktops in microseconds.

Because the NetApp system performs two different

workloads — storage and VDI — “that’s cut down the need

to administer two different systems. We’re just putting all of

our resources into one centralized SAN, and it does it better

than before,” Garcia says. “That’s a huge advantage for us.”

NetApp’s inherent storage capacity efficiency also

will allow Achieva to roll out a new, more complex home

banking system with more bells and whistles because the

NetApp solution can handle the increased requirements for

back-end storage. The IT team also decides how often to

take snapshots of different types of resources, snapping

more important volumes such as customer-facing

applications every 10 minutes, for example.

“With less important information — perhaps, images —

they could set it to take just one or two snaps a day,” Dacey

explains. “Achieva really liked that granularity and the fact

that the snapshots are instantaneous and don’t require any

additional disk space.”

And the team is no longer forced to choose which

applications to replicate to the DR site — important not

only given their past experience but also because of their

location in the middle of Florida’s hurricane alley. The

NetApp SAN solution is now positioned as the cornerstone

of what Achieva Credit Union offers its members, allowing

the institution to continue to innovate and roll out more

sophisticated capabilities as its business grows.

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