Smartphones and mobile banking have made most consumers quite accustomed to –even expecting to– getting access to data anytime, anywhere. This in turn has pushed the financial services industry further to offer customers a variety of other services at their fingertips.
While ubiquitous data access is easy and fast for the consumer, it is underpinned by robust technologies—fast and flexible solutions that enable virtualized infrastructures. Teachers Credit Union is an EMC customer and it too is dealing with these demands and the impact on our operations.
As the largest credit union in the State of Indiana, Teachers Credit Union (TCU) has more than 50 branches and offers traditional services such as loans, deposits and insurance services as well as online and mobile banking services. To ensure these services are always available and meet our “every second of every day” promise, TCU requires a reliable IT environment that delivers the performance our members expect.
TCU’s previous storage solution proved to be unreliable, with increasing incidents of downtime and unplanned outages impacting service levels. At the same time, performance struggled to keep up with our growing data demands. TCU needed a new solution — one that would allow it to offer higher levels of service to our members.
Our solution: transition our entire storage infrastructure onto two EMC VMAX 10K systems, handling about 300 virtual machines using VMware SRM — in a 95% virtualized environment. The VMAX arrays are in two separate Indiana data centers, about 150 miles apart, and there is also an EMC VNX for remote storage in a third location, our corporate office. In addition to these arrays, flash and EMC FAST VP are critical to high performance, and tight integration between EMC RecoverPoint and EMC SRM supports a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, enabling TCU to move our workloads between data centers easily.
Within four months, our VMAX 10K infrastructure was fully operational, aligned with the business and ready to support the natural growth of the organization. Today, TCU is able to meet uptime and performance requirements, providing enhanced member reliability along with the ability to track trends and forecast a year down the road—no small feat in today’s 24/7 world.
We’ve come to rely on EMC to help us meet the anywhere, anytime demands of our business without sacrificing reliability or performance.