Solutions that Grow

HarborOne Credit Union, established in 1917 (as Brockton Credit Union), is the largest state-chartered community credit union in New England, and holds $1.8 billion in assets. The company currently services consumer and business banking customers in Bristol, Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, through a network of 16 branches and a mortgage office.

Challenges | solutions

Primary Storage
In 2004 HarborOne had grown to include 14 branches, and was operating from three sites, with silos of servers and data. John White, VP of Technology Solutions Group, explains, “Disk space wasn’t being utilized well, and some servers were simply old and in need of replacement. When a decision was made to consolidate operations in a brand new building, it was a perfect opportunity to migrate to a newer technology.”

White was convinced that the technology of a SAN was the way to go, a belief that was confirmed by Winslow Technology Group’s proposed solution with its ease-of-use, price point, and scalability. WTG brought in a Compellent SAN proof-of-concept system so HarborOne could test-drive it and validate the boot from SAN capability.

“A huge thing for us was having a product that would grow with us,” says White. “We could have paid a lot more money for a monster of a system with plenty of storage… that we’d only use 20% of initially. The Compellent SAN is modular, so we’ve been able to grow our initial dual controller system with 2 TB to over 20 TB now, adding pieces that made sense, when it made sense. And with everything managed on one console—we practically set it, and forget it!”

In 2009, HarborOne embarked upon a three-year strategic plan with a focus on business process optimization that would provide enterprise-wide efficiencies. Wayne Dunn, CTO says, “We needed to build infrastructure, in order to better address DR and business continuity. But first, we needed to be sure we had a foundation in place.” Dunn gave the Compellent SAN storage solution an A+. However, the backup solution they had at the time drained too many resources for their environment. “It took four hours a day just to manage the tapes, and we spent even more time putting out fires.”

Backup and Restore
White again looked to WTG for a better solution. Ease-of-use was a priority for HarborOne, and the scales tipped toward CommVault as the best backup solution for them. “It’s modular with one console that’s easy. If we add more features—like we did with de-duplication—we’re working with something we already know and understand. It covers us well for different applications, and the GUI is very intuitive.”

Disaster Recovery
With a new and improved storage foundation in place, the focus moved to replicating data to a duplicate SAN as a part of an overall disaster recovery plan. “We knew what we wanted to do,’ says Dunn, “and we needed the right people at the table, to lend their expertise and help with the plan. The WTG team came in and we brainstormed how to meet our goals. They were creative—both technology-wise and budget-wise— in laying out a phased plan to build a duplicate environment for our DR facility that was cost-effective.”

results

Implementation of the Compellent SAN and CommVault data management software, allows the seven-person HarborOne IT staff to focus their energies on improving processes, not worrying about infrastructure.

The Compellent SAN has grown along with HarborOne, yet thanks to its ease-of-use, just one person manages 80 virtual servers in a VMware environment. “The environment has allowed us to have a lean senior-level staff that can focus on getting projects done instead of maintenance,” says Dunn.

HarborOne TSG Senior Infrastructure Officer, Ed Bruce relays, “At a previous employer, I had a storage team. When I came to HarborOne, I was introduced to the Compellent SAN. It‘s so easy, I manage it myself.”

White adds, “our current backup solution is so intuitive, that when Ed was away recently, I was able to do a restore quickly and easily. Someone had inadvertently deleted a SharePoint file and despite having never restored a SharePoint document in CommVault, I was able to do what I need to do in less than 10 minutes. I figured out where to go and how to restore the document.”

From the standpoint of DR, Dunn is projecting a ten-fold improvement in capabilities. “Through SAN to SAN replication, a Citrix environment, and the virtual server environment, we’re essentially presenting a duplicate environment almost at the flip of a switch—realistically within an hour, we’ll be able to get 85% of our applications up and running, available, ready-to-go.”