Tom McKowen, Independent Bank, with Steve Kenniston and Dave Vellante at EMC World 2014
@thecube
#emcworld
s an EMC practitioner, Independent Bank represents a company whose customers rely on the bank’s ability to protect their information. At the same time, the bank is expected to grant those customers access to their data, day and night, from a PC or mobile device. Tom McKowen, VP of Information Technology at Independent Bank, visited theCUBE at EMC World 2014 to talk over his business-specific challenges and the solutions he implemented when it came to storing and protecting his customer’s sensitive financial data.
How IT facilitates Independent Banks’ changing business needs
As part an Independent Bank with a growing paperless environment, McKowen’s IT team has been challenged to “improve business processes to streamline things to try to make it easier and quicker for our customers to transact with the business.”
To be able to provide customers access to their account at all hours, in addition to access to older information like check images, is a challenge that McKowen has embraced. It requires “data availability 24/7, internally and externally” and also means “keeping data online for a long time.”
Data Protection? “Nailed It.”
To overcome those challenges, McKowen decided to become an active/active data center, leveraging EMC VPLEX, RecoverPoint, Atmos in their virtual environment. Implementing these technologies meant their transformation “from a four-hour RPO, fifteen minute RTO to basically a zero downtime environment for the bank and [its] customers.”
Although VPLEX is the primary product Independent Bank uses to protect data and meet its RPOs and RTOs, McKowen also added that behind VPLEX, “Atmos is sitting behind for the archive data, so it’s object-oriented. We have multiple Atmos in our environment, so for the stale content that the customers may need to reference, such as check images, they’re going to come in and hit Atmos for that 0 – 90 day file data, that’s going to be on the Vplex.”
When it comes to tiers, divide and conquer
On of McKowen’s most complex tasks was to align “the expense to the business with the requirement to the business.” For Independent Bank, one of the key features of their storage system had to be “near instantaneous recovery for business-critical applications.”
McKowen decided to separate his system based on what makes the most sense for the bank for two reasons: cost and the ability to provide services. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the business’ needs by clearly communicating was essential to the decision making process: “specifically, that if they were without this application in these time frames, could they still continue business without suffering?” The end result left Independent Bank with a two-tier system:
Tier 1: High-priority data is stored on tier one on a VPLEX. This includes “files associated with customer-facing points: check imaging, the ability to transact with checks coming into the bank, and mortgage processing — all of those critical business applications that have data associated with them.” Tier 1 also has to include some essential back-end, business-facing applications that keep the bank running.
Tier 2: Housing information that is “not critical, not priority” on Recoverpoint, tier two data are “not customer-facing, they’re not going to drive a business process that absolutely has to be there in that four-hour window.”
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Tom McKowen | EMC World 2014
Tom McKowen, Independent Bank, with Steve Kenniston and Dave Vellante at EMC World 2014
@thecube
#emcworld
s an EMC practitioner, Independent Bank represents a company whose customers rely on the bank’s ability to protect their information. At the same time, the bank is expected to grant those customers access to their data, day and night, from a PC or mobile device. Tom McKowen, VP of Information Technology at Independent Bank, visited theCUBE at EMC World 2014 to talk over his business-specific challenges and the solutions he implemented when it came to storing and protecting his customer’s sensitive financial data.
How IT facilitates Independent Banks’ changing business needs
As part an Independent Bank with a growing paperless environment, McKowen’s IT team has been challenged to “improve business processes to streamline things to try to make it easier and quicker for our customers to transact with the business.”
To be able to provide customers access to their account at all hours, in addition to access to older information like check images, is a challenge that McKowen has embraced. It requires “data availability 24/7, internally and externally” and also means “keeping data online for a long time.”
Data Protection? “Nailed It.”
To overcome those challenges, McKowen decided to become an active/active data center, leveraging EMC VPLEX, RecoverPoint, Atmos in their virtual environment. Implementing these technologies meant their transformation “from a four-hour RPO, fifteen minute RTO to basically a zero downtime environment for the bank and [its] customers.”
Although VPLEX is the primary product Independent Bank uses to protect data and meet its RPOs and RTOs, McKowen also added that behind VPLEX, “Atmos is sitting behind for the archive data, so it’s object-oriented. We have multiple Atmos in our environment, so for the stale content that the customers may need to reference, such as check images, they’re going to come in and hit Atmos for that 0 – 90 day file data, that’s going to be on the Vplex.”
When it comes to tiers, divide and conquer
On of McKowen’s most complex tasks was to align “the expense to the business with the requirement to the business.” For Independent Bank, one of the key features of their storage system had to be “near instantaneous recovery for business-critical applications.”
McKowen decided to separate his system based on what makes the most sense for the bank for two reasons: cost and the ability to provide services. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the business’ needs by clearly communicating was essential to the decision making process: “specifically, that if they were without this application in these time frames, could they still continue business without suffering?” The end result left Independent Bank with a two-tier system:
Tier 1: High-priority data is stored on tier one on a VPLEX. This includes “files associated with customer-facing points: check imaging, the ability to transact with checks coming into the bank, and mortgage processing — all of those critical business applications that have data associated with them.” Tier 1 also has to include some essential back-end, business-facing applications that keep the bank running.
Tier 2: Housing information that is “not critical, not priority” on Recoverpoint, tier two data are “not customer-facing, they’re not going to drive a business process that absolutely has to be there in that four-hour window.”
