Finance Company Invests in High Availability with TwinHCI Systems

Organization

An American multi-national finances company providing services such as banking, mortgage, investing, credit card, and personal, small business, and commercial financial services; with 300+ employees and thousands of customers.

Industry

Banking | Financial Services

Challenges

The company’s core goal for their IT infrastructure was to ensure 24/7 availability of their services with minimum to no downtime. This was becoming increasingly difficult due to the growth of customer data, the need to scale, the requirement for compliance, and the limitations of their legacy servers.

Managing important customer data across multiple legacy servers was becoming more and more difficult for them as the volume of data increased.

As a financial services provider, the company was responsible for collecting, storing, analyzing, and managing confidential customer information. As a result, data security was another important factor they had to consider.

With their existing legacy storage systems reaching their end of life, the company needed a solution that guaranteed high availability of customer data, enabled the bank to achieve business continuity, and made sure that the confidential information was safe from threats such as ransomware attacks.

Mark, the company’s CTO, said: “Our customers expect our services to be readily available and they want their data to be secure from threats like ransomware and hackers. That’s the core objective of our digital transformation. We wanted a solution that could do that for us while allowing us to focus our primary efforts and resources into maintaining the quality of our financial services”

Solution

The TwinHCI system is a dual-node clustered hyperconverged solution with automated failover and failback. The built-in software-defined clustering commits data simultaneously to both HCI appliance nodes ensuring that operations continue even if one server goes offline – with minimized downtime.

Furthermore, the preinstalled storage virtualization engine allows the company to reduce management overhead and automate routine tasks – in turn reducing the number of IT personnel required to manage the IT infrastructure.

“We noticed that clustering in StoneFly TwinHCI is faster than the other solutions we were looking-at, at the time” said Mark, “data is committed to both appliances upon creation as opposed to being written once and then replicated or synced over and that’s a major plus for us because we’re minimizing RPOs that way”

The Results

Using the TwinHCI system, the finance company was able to replace their legacy system with a highly available, easy-to-manage and scale, and highly secure storage infrastructure.

In addition to allowing the company to overcome known challenges, the built-in features of the TwinHCI delivered additional value enabling them to improve overall operations, and enhance customer experience.

Mark later stated, “With the TwinHCI, we now have a distributed storage infrastructure which makes sure our critical business and customer data is always available, and secure. After having tested the system several times, we’re confident that we can restore operations within minutes – if disaster strikes.”

Automated Failover and Failback

With the preinstalled storage virtualization engine, the company can set policies to automate failover and failback in the event of a disaster. This capability allows them to reduce Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), ensure business continuity while leveraging automation to minimize the possibility of human error.

Ransomware Protection

In addition to high availability, the company is also able to use the built-in data protection features such as air-gapped volumes, immutable WORM storage, S3 object lockdown, and file lockdown to make sure their critical business and customer data is safe from ransomware attacks.

Ease-of-Management

The company’s IT administrators can monitor, control, and manage all TwinHCI nodes, connected cloud storage repositories, and the integrated data services using a centralized web browser-based management interface.

Features such as automated storage tiering and real-time graphical performance reporting and notification also add to the simplicity of management in turn reducing the dedicated resources needed to manage and maintain the storage infrastructure.

Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Each TwinHCI 4U rackmount can store up to 1.5PBs* of data. This raw storage capacity can be increased by adding more nodes (scale out) or storage expansion units (scale up).

Scale Out: The company can choose to add as many TwinHCI nodes as they need. By adding more nodes, the performance and storage capacity increases in multiples. For example, two nodes provide 2x performance and storage capacity, three nodes increase it to 3x, and so on.

Scale Up: With storage expansion units, each TwinHCI node can support up to 256 drives*. However, storage expansion units (EBODs) only increase the storage capacity – not the performance.

With the ability to scale up and scale out, the finance company can build a future-proof infrastructure capable of growing, without forklift upgrades, as their customer data grows.

* depending on the appliance model, series, and RAID configuration.   

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