SCIENCE

EMC Corporation announced that The Washington Trust Company, the nation's oldest community bank, has built a high performance, cost effective private cloud with EMC unified storage , EMC backup and recovery , and VMware vSphere virtualization  and cloud infrastructure solutions. With a 90% virtualized infrastructure, the bank has achieved faster delivery of new server and unified storage resources, substantial cost savings and improved backup and disaster recovery of core applications, including Oracle and Microsoft Exchange.

Customer Benefits:

• Improved simplicity—servers and unified storage are provisioned in a few hours compared to weeks with their previous storage solution.
• Dramatic cost savings and return on investment—operational and maintenance costs decreased substantially due to a 15:1 server consolidation.
• Increased performance—90% virtualized private cloud infrastructure based on EMC unified storage, VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technology delivered faster response times for branch employees and Internet banking customers who access online check images.
• Better efficiency—95% (20x) reduction in backup data capacity requirements as well as rapid restores and network-efficient replication for disaster recovery were achieved with EMC Data Domain systems.

Unified Storage and VMware Server Consolidation in the Cloud

Washington Trust's growth strategy was beginning to present challenges to its existing IT infrastructure. Managing and scaling their previous IT environment was becoming a more time consuming and expensive process.

Washington Trust decided to build a private cloud using EMC unified storage and VMware vSphere virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. They virtualized environments using VMware technology including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server-based check and statement imaging, loan processing, as well as Oracle test and development servers.

"After we moved to a cloud computing environment we began seeing exponentially better performance," said Mark Smithey, Washington Trust Vice President of Technology Services. "This made a big difference to branch customer service representatives and online banking customers who need immediate access to check images."

"Now, our server and unified storage resources are ready in a few hours at no additional IT operational cost. Because we virtualized 90% of our IT infrastructure, we reduced our servers from 50 to just 4, resulting in additional cost savings in our data center operations.  With our EMC and VMware cloud, IT has become an enabler of growth and banking services to our customers," said Smithey.  "Supporting our users in a faster, more efficient and agile way has been amazing. We can develop strategic plans and solutions that will allow us to scale three to five years down the line."

The Bank also plans to virtualize its Oracle core banking servers as well as any new servers. In the next phase of its journey to cloud, Washington Trust is looking at virtualizing desktops with VMware View and a Vblock Infrastructure Platform from VCE, the Virtual Computing Company, formed by Cisco and EMC, with investments from VMware and Intel.

Next-Generation Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Washington Trust's tape backups were also becoming a challenge for the Bank because of their environment's enormous data growth.  Specifically, backup windows were increasing and backup and recovery was becoming less reliable.  As a result, Washington Trust evaluated new backup options and selected EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems.

Washington Trust replaced tape backup with two Data Domain systems. One Data Domain system protects local backup data and replicates it to a second Data Domain system at the remote location for disaster recovery.

"Our Data Domain backup systems are core to our disaster recovery strategy," said Smithey.  "Not only did we eliminate tapes, but our data reduction rate is 95%, meaning our backup storage capacity requirements are 20-times less than before.  It's also much faster and easier to restore.  A typical 10 megabyte file used to take over an hour to restore. With Data Domain, we get it back in five minutes. And our backups are fully replicated to our remote site which allows us to sleep easier at night."

Washington Trust depends on EMC RecoverPoint continuous remote replication (CRR) to replicate business-critical applications, such as Exchange, Oracle core banking and other applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager integrates with RecoverPoint to automate disaster recovery of the bank's virtual infrastructure.

"With our EMC and VMware powered private cloud if we need to switch over to our remote site, we just press a few buttons and everything is recovered in minutes compared to the hours it used to take," said Smithey. "For example, our remote copy of our Oracle database and primary database are synchronized within five minutes or less when before there was a 30-60 minute lag."