SAN Takes On Financial Sector

The mortgage industry has taken off since the drop in interest rates. Over the past two years companies like Aurora Loan Services Inc. (ALS) (Aurora, CO) have experienced growth. ALS is servicing more than 269,400 loans with a combined principal balance of $30.5 billion. Out of 8 offices and a total of 1,100 employees, 550 employees work out of the company's corporate offices. With inefficient backup, uncontrolled disk space, and lack of server management, ALS looked to Boulder Corp. (Boulder, CO) for a fault-tolerant SAN (storage area network) solution. After working on other ALS projects such as OS (operating system) design and directory service design, Boulder was the natural choice for ALS' storage backup needs.

30,000 Loans, No Disk Space
ALS runs two databases, SQL and Oracle. E-mail, file sharing, and an application for managing desktops were running off these two databases. Inefficiencies surfaced when batches of loans would come in to be processed and disk space wasn't available. "ALS could get 30,000 loans at one time to take care of in one transaction. Because they lacked the disk space necessary, they would have to add drives," says Lesley Taufer, president of Boulder Corp. Adding drives simply covered up the problem; it was not a long-term solution.

In addition to disk space, ALS also needed a more efficient backup system. Because the backup was occurring over the LAN, the process was slow and held up other business practices. "ALS operates instantaneously and can't afford any downtime. They are taking payments, applying them, and managing loans. If systems were to go down, customers could not be properly serviced," explains Taufer.

SAN Solution Produces Revenue
Boulder proposed and designed three server clusters and a SAN. Two server clusters have two Compaq servers each that run on Microsoft. These Microsoft-based clusters support the Oracle and SQL databases. The third server cluster has three Compaq servers running Novell. This Novell cluster communicates with a Fibre Channel SAN. XIOtech's MAGNITUDE RAID (redundant array of independent disks) device and a Fibre Channel switch from Brocade are part of the SAN.

With this new system, ALS has a force of dedicated backup servers, eliminating any downtime it had before. They also have the ability to create a mirrored copy of the data and implement snapshot backup, making the system fault-tolerant. With the snapshot capability, backup can be completed without interrupting users on the network. Boulder is currently building a remote SAN to replicate the data. The company will implement Fibre Channel over IP (Internet protocol) so they can mirror to remote sites.

The total cost of the installation was $360,000. However, revenue is not the only benefit Boulder received from this installation; Taufer says the knowledge gained is a bigger asset. "We needed enough people for this project that even our lesser experienced employees had the opportunity to watch the process and learn how to perform these tasks," notes Taufer.