Sharonview Federal Credit Union Gains Disaster Recovery Assurance While Reducing Backup Windows with Unitrends

Columbia, SC (PRWEB) January 26, 2010

Unitrends (unitrends.com), the leader in affordable, heterogeneous D2D (Disk-to-Disk) and D2D2D (Disk-to-Disk-to-Disk)-based data protection backup appliances, today announced that Sharonview Federal Credit Union has recently upgraded to Unitrends latest data protection appliances after successfully relying on Unitrends for more than five years. With its new Unitrends solutions in place, the growing non-profit credit union has cut backup windows in half while assuring disaster recovery preparedness by vaulting its data to an offsite location using Unitrends technology.

Headquartered in Fort Mill, SC, Sharonview Federal Credit Union began as an employer-based credit union in the 1950s. Today, Sharonview is a full-service, not-for-profit financial institution with assets of $ 900 million serving more than 59,000 members with 22 branches in South Carolina, North Carolina and New Jersey.

As it grew, Sharonview was facing a dramatically increasing quantity of data, an expanded network infrastructure, and storage environment complexity. In 2005, Sharonview decided it was time to get away from the credit unions painstaking tape backup process. Sharonviews tape backups were a hassle to manage, requiring manual review of logs to determine whether backup jobs were successful. Whats worse, there was no way to fully recover a failed server, even after extensive investment in a new tape library and new tape backup software.

While seeking a new solution with better speed and reliability for up to 1TB of data, Sharonview also wanted to improve its disaster recovery readiness while also encrypting critical financial data to meet privacy and security requirements. After evaluating its options, Sharonview purchased disk-to-disk data protection units from Unitrends. Following a successful implementation in 2006 and efficient performance results ever since, Sharonview recently upgraded to Unitrends latest technology in 2009 to accommodate their growing data store. Now with three new Unitrends appliances in place, the growing credit union has cut their backup window in half.

We were probably one of the early adopters of Unitrends, said Mark Johnson, CIO, Sharonview Federal Credit Union. Now after five years we are completely satisfied. When it was time to expand after five years, we didn’t even look anywhere else, we were happy with the Unitrends product.

Today, Sharonview uses Unitrends to backup SANs and individual servers and to vault data to another location for disaster recovery assurance. It also uses the Unitrends Baremetal recovery feature for whole system protection, and the included Unitrends Exchange Agent for email protection. Backups are encrypted with InCrypt 256-AES encryption, delivering the integrated security required by this member-focused, and highly successful financial institution.

When we migrated from tape to Unitrends five years ago we cut our backup way down, then cut it in half again when we upgraded to the latest Unitrends hardware earlier this year, said Kevin Hughes, network engineer, Sharonview Federal Credit Union. We invested in a SAN earlier this year, and are now using the Unitrends product to back up individual servers as well as our (new) SAN.

Its always exciting to play a role in the business success of our customers, said Maria Ellison, senior vice president, support, Unitrends. Sharonview Federal Credit Union has been very pleased in their ability to perform individual file recovery in minutes versus hours with Unitrends while receiving both whole system local backups and offsite vaulting at a remote location for complete disaster recovery.

For more information, please view the complete Sharonview Federal Credit Union Success Story.

About Unitrends:

Small and medium businesses have the same critical reliance on the integrity of their data as enterprises, but often cant afford the operational expenditure of a dedicated staff or the capital expenditure of replacing their IT infrastructure. Unitrends provides enterprise-level data protection, at the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry, through a family of scalable disk-based data protection appliances that integrate and protect existing heterogeneous computer and storage systems through a single, intuitive, graphical user interface.

Unitrends uses a common backup and recovery engine for providing protection for over 100 different versions of operating systems and applications. This means you can support Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, Sun Solaris, Novell OES, Novell Netware, Novell GroupWise, Novell eDirectory, Linux, FreeBSD, Apple MacOS X, IBM pSeries/AIX, HP HP-UX, SCO UnixWare, SCO OpenServer, IBM iSeries/OS400, and SGI IRIX on notebooks, PCs, workstations, and servers and on DAS, NAS, or SAN storage.

Information about Unitrends can be found at http://www.unitrends.com.

###

Find More Disaster Recovery And Backup Services Press Releases

Sharonview Federal Credit Union Gains Disaster Recovery Assurance While Reducing Backup Windows with Unitrends

United Technology Group Partners with NetApp to Develop Cutting Edge Enterprise-class Backup System for SRP Federal Credit Union

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) August 9, 2010

United Technology Group (UTG), a trusted provider of IT solutions in the Metro Atlanta area, recently partnered with the leading innovator of storage and virtualization solutions, NetApp, to implement an incredibly successful backup system for SRP Federal Credit Union in North Augusta, South Carolina. Faced with SRP’s unwieldy and fragmented local storage, which was significantly impacting efficiency and risking customer data, UTG set out to plan a new centralized data center and a fully redundant disaster recovery bunker in conjunction with NetApp.

Founded in 1960, the SRP Federal Credit Union has grown to 350 full time employees located at 20 branch offices throughout Georgia and South Carolina. The backup windows of their critical data were quickly growing beyond the acceptable limits. While planning for replication to the disaster recovery facility, there was no clean way to replicate the data with their existing server architecture. Because the SAN solution is so foundational to the entire IT infrastructure, UTG recommended NetApp as the storage vendor based on the vendor’s exceptional engineering and cost-effective value.

UTG helped SRP migrate their current infrastructure to a blade server solution leveraging NetApp unified storage architecture. Once the production environment was running on this new equipment, it was extremely easy to replicate the entire server system to a second NetApp that would be used for disaster recovery in the off-site data center. NetApp’s SnapMirror

United Technology Group Partners with NetApp to Develop Cutting Edge Enterprise-class Backup System for SRP Federal Credit Union

Coastal Federal Credit Union Selects BlueStripe FactFinder To Ensure Consistent Customer Experience via Personal Teller Machines

Research Triangle Park, NC (PRWEB) June 05, 2012

BlueStripe Software, a leader in application and transaction monitoring for IT Operations, today announced that Coastal Federal Credit Union is using BlueStripes FactFinder to ensure the availability and performance of critical business systems including Coastals innovative Personal Teller Machine (PTM) system.

The PTM system allows Coastal Credit Union members to interact with a live teller via a video banking kiosk by communicating through two-way video, touch screens and a private audio network. The availability of the Teller application and the systems that support it is critical to a positive customer experience. FactFinder enabled the IT team to clearly see exactly which systems made up the Teller service and how each of them was performing.

FactFinder gives us a precision we did not previously have, eliminating the guesswork when finding the root cause of application slowdowns, commented Chris Whitesock, IT Director, Coastal Federal Credit Union. FactFinder is a necessity in our data center, giving us real-time visibility into every connection in our applications even those we didnt know existed.

The FactFinder Transaction Monitoring solution automatically discovers, maps, and monitors all business transactions running across the infrastructure. FactFinder measures performance, hop-by-hop, everywhere that transactions go, across tiers, across platforms, and across architectures even into virtual machines, private cloud, and third party services. When performance or availability problems occur, FactFinder follows the slow or hung transaction right to the problem component; then drills down the server stack to determine why the problem occurred.

FactFinder is also the key component of Coastals Service Level Monitoring process, delivering the transaction performance metrics that are the cornerstone of enforceable application SLAs. Additionally, Coastal plans to use FactFinder in its corporate test environment as part of the process for rolling out vendor upgrades. FactFinder gives Coastal a clear view of dependencies along a transaction chain, highlighting potential issues the upgrade may cause.

BlueStripe is proud to be an instrumental piece of Coastals leading edge, interactive teller application that breaks the mold of bankers hours and provides better service to customers, said Chris Neal, CEO of BlueStripe Software. BlueStripes ability to provide a unique, Operations-centric view of transaction performance is critical to understanding service levels and quickly identifying any issues impacting application performance.

About BlueStripe Software

BlueStripe Software provides the next generation of transaction performance management solutions. BlueStripes flagship product, FactFinder, is the only solution with automated application management and transaction monitoring in a single product so that IT Operations & Support teams can monitor and manage complete application system and transaction performance, 24×7 – across any platform: physical, virtual, or cloud. Headquartered in North Carolinas prestigious Research Triangle Park (RTP), BlueStripe was founded by successful IT Software startup veterans. For additional information, please visit http://bluestripe.com.

Coastal Federal Credit Union Selects BlueStripe FactFinder To Ensure Consistent Customer Experience via Personal Teller Machines

Disaster Recovery Benefits Lead More Credit Unions to Select CUtopias OASys Core Data Processing System

Orlando, FL (PRWEB) September 07, 2012

CCC Van Wert Credit Union in Ohio and Concora Wabash Federal Credit Union in Indiana have selected the OASys core data processing system citing disaster recovery benefits as a key to their decisions. The product is offered by CUtopia; a division of Worldwide Interactive Services, LLC. Both credit unions previously used CuServ from Harland Financial Solutions.

The critical nature of disaster recovery has become an increasingly major focus of all sized credit unions in the past few years. Not only related to security breach and downtime issues, but also the impact natural disasters and unexpected events can inflict on operations. The OASys hosted solution will relieve us of the burden of disaster recovery and the feature/functionality of the system will automate many processes we currently perform manually,” stated CC Van Wert CEO Pam Ehman.

With data centers in Orlando and Atlanta, OASys attains full redundancy within high security data centers. This makes the OASys solution easily transportable allowing credit union clients to re-establish operations by simply accessing the internet. It also makes disaster coordination easier through the use of a single vendor for both staff-facing (core) and member facing (web, mobile and telephone banking) services in a fully hosted environment.

Minda Parish, CEO of the 276 member, $ 1.2 million Concora Wabash Federal Credit Union commented that, With the ever changing regulations and guidelines the government has placed on financial institutions, we felt that OASys offered the most compliant friendly program available. Our disaster recovery is already taken care of the day we go live allowing us to access and operate our system from any location. Credit union confidentiality will be easier with automatic name checks against the OFAC system. Were just beginning to discover other features that will help make our operations run smoother and we cant wait to get the system implemented, stated Ms. Parish.

The OASys core processing system is designed for credit unions that are limited by their current system, yet require a low cost of ownership. The cloud based/hosted system provides operational flexibility and delivers a highly functional, reliable and fully compliant solution that is configurable to the credit unions unique environment. Managers who still wrestle with manual functionality will welcome the automated features that include OFAC, end of day, credit bureau and call reporting as well as automated back-up. Credit unions that need to stay competitive dont need to settle for plain vanilla systems, says Chris Pantaleon, Director of Business Development at CUtopia. OASys adds a new level of automation plus 24/7 live support and customer service, training and support, unmatched in the industry.

About CUtopia Solutions: CUtopia, provides a comprehensive, suite of technology services to small to mid-sized credit unions. From core data processing and audio response, to mobile and online banking, to check imaging and eStatements, CUtopia helps credit unions to compete effectively while streamlining their processes with state-or-the-art technologies and user-friendly solutions, As a credit union technology service provider, CUtopias goal is to enrich each individual credit unions capabilities by offering proven solutions backed by a team of forward-thinking innovators with a spirit for service. CUtopia is a division of Worldwide Interactive Services, LLC, a respected banking and credit union technology company founded in 1995 that serves more than 300 credit unions and banks throughout the U.S. All CUtopia services are AICPA Service Organization Control Reports certified. http://www.cutopiasolutions.com 888-596-4947

Disaster Recovery Benefits Lead More Credit Unions to Select CUtopias OASys Core Data Processing System