With 70 years of growth under their belt, Diamond Credit Union (DCU) started to see a higher demand for infrastructure requests from their members, specifically around performance, resulting in higher customer wait times when processing banking requests. As mobile banking requests increase, so do the performance hits on aging systems. Their users started to experience service slowdowns when activity at the branches and online increased.
Diamond Credit Union (DCU) is a Pennsylvania state-chartered and federally-insured credit union. They offer low-cost financial services with could class expertise since 1947.
As a not-for-profit financial cooperative, Diamond Credit Union is owned an operated by its members. With nearly 1 billion in assets managed and over 60,000 members, Diamond is one of the area’s largest member-owned credit unions.
“This array is insane! I’ve been moving VM’s to it the past 24 hours and every machine on the new array feels like its brand new. Its just a world of difference. Simply incredible. Call me a happy customer.”
-K. Sauer, IT Operations – Diamond Credit Union
Industry: Banking
Location: Pottstown, PA
Employees: 300
Assets Managed: $1 Billion
Members: 60,000+
Challenge
DCU’s challenge was to find a new storage solution that can handle the increasing demands of customer requests, is affordable, is easy to administer, and can scale as the bank grows, with ease and efficiency. The IT team at Diamond has their hands full on a daily basis, monitoring infrastructure, maintaining VDI desktops and banking apps, answering support calls from employees to banking customers. Not to mention general IT tasks that keep their infrastructure streamlined for everyone. Their search to replace their legacy storage needed to be an array that could handle their databases, virtual machines, files systems and Exchange servers.
Solution
The Team at MTP (MTP), met with the team at Diamond Credit Union(DCU) to determine what their needs were, not just today, but over the next few years. We designed a roadmap specifically with growth in mind while making sure that administration and deployment would be easy.
Sauer and his team knew that they needed to find a replacement. Given their experiences with their previous storage array manufacturer, they wanted to proceed carefully and investigated the many solutions available. “We conducted our search for more than a year. We really wanted to get things right for the bank. We were looking for an array that could help us shrink our data center footprint and provide enough raw storage so that we don’t have to buy storage every two or three years” said Sauer “We wanted to make sure we found the real deal, something that could handle our bank’s needs, and then some.”
The DCU team looked into virtually every vendor imaginable. “Research was by far the biggest challenge for us. We fielded every phone call, talked to every salesperson, and consulted all of our industry colleagues,” said Sauer “The MTP team was the only team who came back with exactly what we were looking for: an all-flash array that could meet our performance and capacity needs, and at a reasonable cost. It sounds simple, but you’d be surprised as to just how hard it is for vendors to deliver on this premise. Once we found the Tegile product portfolio, things were extremely easy.”
The team at Morris Technology introduced DCU team to the Tegile a Western Digital Company, and all it had to offer. We should them how easily the array can be increased in size and efficiency and showed the benefits of no more tiering, the benefits of no more forklift upgrades, the unparalleled performance, as well as the ease of administration. We at Morris Technology provided Diamond Credit Union with an ROI showing true, measurable savings from day one. That was the icing on the cake for the final solution. Tegile’s IntelliFlash Array.
“The Morris Technology team was the only team who came back with exactly what we were looking for: all-flash arrays that could meet our performance and capacity needs, and at a reasonable cost. Once we found the Tegile product portfolio, things were extremely easy.”
-K. Sauer, IT Operations – Diamond Credit Union
Results
For Sauer and his team, the IntelliFlash array has made a huge impact on their day-to-day operations. “We have zero latency now,” said Sauer “We don’t hear a peep from our users about lag times, storage issues, or anything else that falls under our purview, which is a good thing. In IT, no news is good news. The speed of the Tegile array is also making things easier on the backend for Diamond’s team as well. “It used to take us 40 minutes to set up a single LUN, now it takes just a few minutes.” Since deploying the Tegile IntelliFlash array, Diamond Credit Union has also seen impressive data reduction rates, and they have shrunken their physical footprint to boot. “With the array, everything is reduced, both physically and digitally,” said Sauer “We’re running a data reduction rate of 43 percent, and on top of that, we’ve shrunken our data center footprint from 48RU to just 6RU. It’s hard to beat that.”
Tegile IntelliFlash arrays combine innovations in flash management, data persistence, and data management to deliver unprecedented levels of performance, data consolidation, simplicity, and economics. With IntelliFlash, Diamond can consolidate virtually all of its workloads and data onto a single array to achieve the best balance of performance and economics at scale. The bank has also been extremely pleased with the cost savings that Tegile IntelliFlash brings to the table. “We calculated it out, and we’re saving roughly 47 percent when compared to what we’d be paying for in terms of maintenance from the other vendors we were looking at,” said Sauer “Everything with Morris Technology and Tegile has been a breeze. The sales process, the installation, and the maintenance. We’re glad they have our backs, and we plan to continue working with Morris Technology in the future.”