There's more than meets the eye when it comes to Guthrie Center in rural Iowa. Other than being home to legendary Hardees CEO, Jack Laughery, the city boasts a growing population and economy. Enter GCSB (Guthrie County State Bank), a small yet integral state bank with a problem or two.
“After deploying the VMware hosts and virtualizing the servers, we struggled with various backup procedures that needed to be simple and cost effective” said Steve Brubaker, IT Manager at GCSB. “The next step was to find a suitable Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan. It became very apparent that the only way to go was install some type of SAN system for shared storage that would allow redundancy and mobility of the virtual servers.”
The Solution
It was clear to GCSB early on that tape drives were too expensive and unreliable. Keen on finding a solution that would be both cost effective and simple, the bank analyzed the market for a lengthy 4 months, which included both hardware and software solutions. Finally, GCSB found a consolidated solution in StorMagic’s SvSAN.
“It met the requirements of being simple and cost effective, was easy to deploy, allowed for the usage of existing or off the shelf hardware, and proved to be very stable.”
SvSAN is integrated into vCenter making it one of the easiest and most intuitive interfaces on the market. As a result, organizations like GCSB are able to add to their business continuity initiatives with Highly Available datastores enabling them to deliver continuous access to datastores and maintain online applications and constant accessibility.
The Result
The search for a solution that offers both simplicity and cost effectiveness may appear daunting at first. However, GCSB’s careful and evaluative approach to the situation led them to the exact solution they were seeking. And it wasn’t over quite yet.
GCSB followed up their selection with rigorous testing that ensured the SvSAN was just the right solution for them. In the end, Steve puts it best:
“We asked a lot in the testing phase. The biggest benefits to me over a hardware solution are not being tied into a set hardware package and the ease of updating and expanding as we need. Not to mention the cost difference. There are other software solutions available, some less expensive and some more expensive. But when looking at simplicity and dependability for the money, StorMagic was the only choice.”