Wednesday, June 8, 2011

George Crump, Senior Analyst

Associated Bank is a 150 year old, full service bank based in the midwest with over 5,000 employees and 280 banking locations. As you would expect the IT department has the challenge of creating an infrastructure that not only supports but advances the bank’s move to the online world as well as make sure it maintains legally required retention and disaster recovery standards.

Up until 2006 the bank had no shared storage until they acquired another bank that had another SAN and they tried to integrate that into their infrastructure and leverage its use in support of a document imaging environment. The result of that attempt almost caused a heart attack, especially since they were coming from a direct attached storage mindset. They were stunned at the cost to integrate, maintain as well as upgrade that environment. Still they needed to move to a shared storage environment so they went looking for a solution that was easier to use and less expensive to purchase.

After careful review they chose Compellent as their answer for this easier to use, more efficient storage platform. The initial configuration was a 17TB iSCSI based system to support their document imaging initiative as well as support other platforms.

Almost every vendor and reseller I talk to will assure you that they can get your SAN up and running, eventually, and in many cases will end up with a "satisfied" customer but can they get the customer to be a fan? What I look for during implementations is what was the customer experience during the installation? Did they see a lot of head scratching and phone calls being made with a heroic save at the end to get the system up and running? Or did they see an implementation that went exactly as planned, almost boring? Boring is good when it comes to SAN implementations.

One of the best gages of satisfaction vs. fan is how fast does the customer add storage.  My impression in the case of Associated Bank was that they must have been very much in the fan category since in the next 300 days that went from 17TB's of capacity to 300TBs(!) of capacity. What caused this increase? First obviously the initial project, document imaging, went well and then they decided to add Microsoft Exchange and other applications on it. Then they even leveraged the Compellent SAN for their disk backup targets as well as replicating to another Compellent SAN to their DR location. As time progressed since then they have grown to 8 production Compellent systems mirrored between the two data centers and now have over 900TB's of Compellent storage.

They are leveraging it heavily with their virtualized environment and have fibre channel for increase infrastructure bandwidth and flexibility. They leverage HP blade servers for the virtual server environment (yes, Compellent still works on non-Dell servers) which allows them to aggregate blades on just a few fibre connections saving infrastructure costs. The virtual environment is 550 virtual machines on 14 hosts, almost 40 VM's per host and they have virtualized almost all of them.

The most impressive part of the conversation for me was the reports of how easy the environment is to manage. According to Kory and Dan, this 8 Compellent, 900TB system requires less than 24 hours per month across four people to manage (6 hours per person). When you consider all the variables in this environment, two protocols (iSCSI and Fibre), large virtualization effort with still some physical servers remaining and the capacity, 24 hours is incredibly low. Triple that number would be acceptable for many environments.

Going forward Associated Bank has huge focus on increasing customer service, something they call a Customer Excellence program, continued physical growth plans both through acquisition and organically as well as a continued push to more and more online applications. They are also beginning a virtual desktop rollout that they expect to expand. Despite all this they remain confident that their Compellent will be their SAN system of choice for years to come.