In a town where gambling is king and cash flows like water, a Las Vegas credit union is saving serious bucks in securing its critical technology infrastructure while simultaneously pushing the envelope of its IT system's overall performance.
A do-it-yourself attitude is the key behind these operational efficiencies at Clark County Credit Union, where the head bean counter and the chief technologist sit at the same desk.
That would be Roy Holmstrom, chief information officer and chief financial officer of the $600,000 financial institution that has been doing such things as building its own desktop PCs and servers for the past 10 years.
Buying the constituent pieces and parts in bulk, Holmstrom and two colleagues can, for example, build a desktop PC for $400 or so that would cost about $880 plus shipping and any extra warranties from a major dealer such as HP or Dell, Holmstrom said.
The savings are even greater on the array of high-dollar servers that function as the byte-crunching engine of the modern financial institution. Clark County CU assembles those, too, at a savings of $6,000 to $24,000 per unit, Holmstrom said.
He also eschews maintenance agreements that Holmstrom said can cost $500 a year apiece or more for servers from the get go.
"We don't need those contracts, and most of our servers continue to run without issue for five or six years anyway," he said. "I can't imagine what the fourth or fifth year of a support contract would cost now."
Holmstrom said security as well as savings is stressed in his system set ups. "We typically build an extra station for each location, so when a PC goes down, we can either fix it on the fly or put the spare in place in minutes," he said.
"The effect really expands when we begin discussing servers," Holmstrom added. "We build in a lot of redundancy and self-repairing characteristics so that the servers are up and running without ever going down for 12 to 24 months between reboots.
"Plus, our current servers are built with triple redundant power supplies, redundant CPUs, hard drive arrays that can withstand the failure of two drives over a weekend and still keep running, error-correcting memory, redundant LAN connections, etc., etc., etc."
"These machines are built to keep running through nearly every scenario, and even with all that, we beat the manufacturers buy a long shot in price."
Besides savings, Holmstrom and his staff take the opportunity to seriously rev up their computers' performance. For instance, they deploy a Fusion-io drive that increases input-output times from the typical 3,000 per second on a SCSI drive to 50,000 per second.
"They're unbelievably, screaming fast," Holmstrom said. "That's another good thing about engineering things yourself, besides the savings. Right now, the name players aren't even playing with these drives yet, although I hear HP is coming out with a server like that."
The veteran CIO/CFO's passion for efficiencies and savings extends beyond the computers. For instance, the same type of printer is used throughout the enterprise, allowing for big savings through buying ink cartridges and parts for in-house maintenance in bulk, Holmstrom said.
He also pits vendors against each other in a kind of reverse auction setting, arranging conference calls in which vendors compete for the lowest price on, say, a group of 30 Raptor 300 drives.
"It's rather ruthless," he said. "But we really are involved in a lot of forward thinking here and I think our staff find it really fulfilling, especially when they put together something and see it work in ways that even the vendors haven't experienced."
The thrill is there, but so is the bottom line, Holmstrom said.
"We don't do all this because it's cool," the Las Vegas credit union executive said. "Everything we do has to have a payback for the membership. This is their money we're responsible for. It's not Monopoly money."
Holmstrom joined Clark County CU in 1997 and began doing the do-it-yourself work a couple years later, using the experience he first began gaining building PCs himself back in the mid-1980s.
"I love it. When you can do something better and cheaper, it's hard to find a downside in that. It's great for both the CIO and CFO in me," he said.
--mrapport@cutimes.com
A do-it-yourself attitude is the key behind these operational efficiencies at Clark County Credit Union, where the head bean counter and the chief technologist sit at the same desk.
That would be Roy Holmstrom, chief information officer and chief financial officer of the $600,000 financial institution that has been doing such things as building its own desktop PCs and servers for the past 10 years.
Buying the constituent pieces and parts in bulk, Holmstrom and two colleagues can, for example, build a desktop PC for $400 or so that would cost about $880 plus shipping and any extra warranties from a major dealer such as HP or Dell, Holmstrom said.
The savings are even greater on the array of high-dollar servers that function as the byte-crunching engine of the modern financial institution. Clark County CU assembles those, too, at a savings of $6,000 to $24,000 per unit, Holmstrom said.
He also eschews maintenance agreements that Holmstrom said can cost $500 a year apiece or more for servers from the get go.
"We don't need those contracts, and most of our servers continue to run without issue for five or six years anyway," he said. "I can't imagine what the fourth or fifth year of a support contract would cost now."
Holmstrom said security as well as savings is stressed in his system set ups. "We typically build an extra station for each location, so when a PC goes down, we can either fix it on the fly or put the spare in place in minutes," he said.
"The effect really expands when we begin discussing servers," Holmstrom added. "We build in a lot of redundancy and self-repairing characteristics so that the servers are up and running without ever going down for 12 to 24 months between reboots.
"Plus, our current servers are built with triple redundant power supplies, redundant CPUs, hard drive arrays that can withstand the failure of two drives over a weekend and still keep running, error-correcting memory, redundant LAN connections, etc., etc., etc."
"These machines are built to keep running through nearly every scenario, and even with all that, we beat the manufacturers buy a long shot in price."
Besides savings, Holmstrom and his staff take the opportunity to seriously rev up their computers' performance. For instance, they deploy a Fusion-io drive that increases input-output times from the typical 3,000 per second on a SCSI drive to 50,000 per second.
"They're unbelievably, screaming fast," Holmstrom said. "That's another good thing about engineering things yourself, besides the savings. Right now, the name players aren't even playing with these drives yet, although I hear HP is coming out with a server like that."
The veteran CIO/CFO's passion for efficiencies and savings extends beyond the computers. For instance, the same type of printer is used throughout the enterprise, allowing for big savings through buying ink cartridges and parts for in-house maintenance in bulk, Holmstrom said.
He also pits vendors against each other in a kind of reverse auction setting, arranging conference calls in which vendors compete for the lowest price on, say, a group of 30 Raptor 300 drives.
"It's rather ruthless," he said. "But we really are involved in a lot of forward thinking here and I think our staff find it really fulfilling, especially when they put together something and see it work in ways that even the vendors haven't experienced."
The thrill is there, but so is the bottom line, Holmstrom said.
"We don't do all this because it's cool," the Las Vegas credit union executive said. "Everything we do has to have a payback for the membership. This is their money we're responsible for. It's not Monopoly money."
Holmstrom joined Clark County CU in 1997 and began doing the do-it-yourself work a couple years later, using the experience he first began gaining building PCs himself back in the mid-1980s.
"I love it. When you can do something better and cheaper, it's hard to find a downside in that. It's great for both the CIO and CFO in me," he said.
--mrapport@cutimes.com
