LANSING, Mich. — The IT managers at NuUnion Credit Union decided a conversion to an open core processing platform was a good time to go ahead and move their data backup solution to an appliance that could handle 40 servers handling everything from online banking to tellers' printers at more than a dozen locations.

The $802 million CU went live on a STORServer Backup Appliance in February, just before going live on its new core processing system from Open Solutions, said Karen Grost, the Lansing CU's business continuity specialist.

Working with a local re-seller, Daytona Storage, and with a support staffer from Open Solutions dialing in, Grost and her colleagues spent three days setting up the hardware, loading software and “making sure they talked to each” other and launched the new system. She later spent four days in training with STORServer Inc. in Colorado.

Now, Grost is enjoying the fruits of that labor: A disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) system with a 10-terabyte capacity that can do overnight the backing up that took her previous system an entire weekend, sometimes more.

Live backups during the day also are doable, and if a backup does get halted for some reason, the STORServer system simply picks up where it left off, instead of requiring a complete do-over, Grost said.

Data recovery, such as crucial lost files by front-end users, also has been made easier. “Before, anytime that would happen, I had to send an operator out to get a tape, and then we'd have to search through the tape for that file, and hope it was on that actual tape. At 40 minutes a trip, and then the searching time, it was costing us a lot of resources,” she said.

Redundancy is built into the STORServer system. “It's got a sophisticated database, and once you back up a file, there's no need to do it again and again,” said Ellen Rome, vice president of sales and marketing at STORServer in Elkton, Colo. “You always have at least two copies. One onsite for immediate restores, and the other offsite in case of disaster recovery.”

NuUnion is currently using one of the appliances, generating backup tapes that are then sent offsite for storage. A second appliance is on standby at one of the CU's 14 branches, in case it's needed for disaster recovery.

While perhaps seen as “old school” among some techies who favor alternatives such as storage-area networks over VPNs, tape backup still remains very much a viable solution at thousands of financial institutions.

Rome, the STORServer vice president, said her company serves more than 500 clients, many of them financial institutions. “We certainly have disk-to-disk, but for much of our customer base, it's still disk-to-disk-to-tape,” she said. “Tape is still a very economical, functional solution for a lot of people.”

That includes NuUnion. While there might be tapeless backup in her future, “I'm not sure we're ready to make that kind of move,” Grost said. “We just signed a contract with SunGard for our recovery system, and it's much easier to take our tapes with us than a SAN.”

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