Credit Union Cuts Administrative Costs 75% With Tape Library

The Southern Federal Credit Union (TSFCU) was formed in 1963 to help a group of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees secure more competitive financial services. Over the years, TSFCU has expanded its charter, growing to serve more than 22,000 members and more than 190 employee groups throughout metropolitan Atlanta.

According to David Gill, network administrator for TSFCU, leading-edge technologies play a pivotal role in keeping the credit union's mission-critical business environment up and running. Gill is part of a three-person team that oversees IT operations while maintaining a midrange HP system running core financial applications. The team also oversees 100 end user workstations, 8 domain servers, and 10 application servers holding up to 2 TB of essential information.

"Our goal is to preserve all critical data while ensuring complete compliance with all auditing requirements," says Gill. "For that reason, conducting regular backups is an essential task that cannot be overlooked." Still, TSFCU's technology team struggled to keep up with nightly backups of each tape drive attached to its various servers. Over time, the process became cumbersome, especially as data continued to grow at a rate of about 15% to 20% annually. When the team learned that HP was phasing out its HP 3000 platform, TSFCU decided to take advantage of an upgrade program to deploy a high-performance HP 9000 UNIX-based system in its place. The IT team also took the opportunity to reinforce its overall backup and recovery strategies. TSFCU's tech team solicited the assistance of Digital Data Solutions (DDS), a storage solutions provider, for guidance on overhauling the credit union's storage platform.

TSFCU's tech team knew it wanted a tape-based solution, so it developed a shortlist of viable tape library solution providers. The team eventually went with Overland Storage's compact NEO Series 4100 midrange library. DDS brought a tape library to TSFCU's headquarters and demonstrated the library's capabilities and compatibility with NetVault backup and recovery software from BakBone Software.

Early on, TSFCU experienced an opportunity to put its new backup and recovery solution to the ultimate test. One of the organization's key SQL databases became corrupted and needed to be restored immediately. Gill estimates its storage overhaul has cut TSFCU's total administrative time and costs by nearly 75%.