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THE CUSTOMER - CITISTREET: CitiStreet is a premier global employee benefits provider. The organization offers a broad range of products and services for contribution, benefit and health and welfare plans. CitiStreet services more than 17,000 plans and 11 million participants across all markets. It is the second largest defined contribution provider by the number of participants it serves and the third largest by assets under administration.

THE CHALLENGE -  LOST TAPES WOULD BE CATASTROPHIC: Because of the various regulations to which CitiStreet is subject, the organization is required to retain certain types of information for seven years, some of it on non-alterable (i.e, WORM—write once, ready many) storage media. For disaster recovery, CitiStreet was sending duplicate copies of this data—as well as other data—off-site, a common practice for many organizations, but one that left CitiStreet feeling vulnerable if the media were lost or stolen. “We wanted to avoid having to send media off site because people can lose things and that’s a huge risk,” said Jeff Machols, systems integration manager for CitiStreet. If compliance data were lost, the organization could face stiff penalties. Beyond that, given that much of the data contains sensitive customer information, lost media would cause extensive damage to CitiStreet’s reputation and brand, potentially affecting revenue and profit.

THE SOLUTION - REPLICATION ‘OVER THE WIRE’: CitiStreet turned to Datalink to architect a solution that would provide replication capabilities from its primary location to its disaster recovery location (capabilities that were more secure than cloning to portable media). The organization was also hoping to capitalize on management efficiencies and cost savings in the process. Datalink, in turn, offered CitiStreet insight about the key technologies that would help the company achieve its goal. “We expressed a generic business need and then Datalink recommended the best solution for us—vendor agnostic. This was helpful because we didn’t have to worry about going to 10 vendors, sifting through their marketing and figuring out what’s real and what’s not real,” Machols said. “The key was to have an unbiased recommendation about the best technology for this environment,” he said. Datalink recommended and ultimately implemented Network Appliance Fabric-Attached Storage (FAS) systems with disk-based WORM storage and replication capabilities. Currently, the organization is backing up to disk locally using snapshot technology and replicating email data between the primary and disaster recovery locations. CitiStreet plans to begin replicating its file server data in the imminent future and once that phase is complete, they will look at rolling other applications, such as the UNIX environment, into this solution.

THE BENEFITS - A MORE SECURE AND EFFICIENT OPERATION: The implementation of this technology is providing multiple benefits to CitiStreet. “From a business standpoint, the enhanced security of our data is first and foremost the primary advantage. It’s not really something you can quantify, except to say that if we lost any type of data because we were sending it off site, it would be absolutely catastrophic for CitiStreet,” Machols said. The solution provides fast, seamless replication over a dedicated, encrypted circuit, without the opportunity for human error. And, the organization did not have to “upgrade the pipe” to gain the ability to replicate data. The replication from appliance to appliance is extremely fast and does not tax the Wide Area Network (WAN).

Improved Backup Performance and Recoverability
The speed and efficiency of disk-based backup and replication offers a huge improvement over the previous method, which consisted of backing up to a virtual tape library and then cloning to tapes that were kept off site in a vault for permanent retention. From a recoverability standpoint, CitiStreet is now assured that it has recent backups that can be quickly and easily restored and, as a result, is able to meet much more stringent SLAs. For instance, previously backups were generated every night. In the event of a disaster, the worst case scenario was that the organization could have lost 23 hours of data and spent at least a day to recover it. Now, with snapshots taken every hour, the worst case scenario is that one hour of data would be lost. Recovery, meanwhile, would be almost instantaneous.

Reduction in Footprint
On the file server side, the organization will realize a huge reduction in its backup footprint, according to Machols. “The snapshot represents true bit level differentials—so you’re only getting a copy of what’s actually changed as opposed to doing a traditional full backup and incrementals,” Machols elaborated. By conservative estimates, he says the organization will see a 50 percent reduction of space required for backups on the file server side, which will in turn generate significant cost savings. This also applies to the tape side, where the organization has been able to eliminate two enterprise tape libraries entirely along with several tape drives in the existing libraries.

Simplification
The solution is also enabling CitiStreet to simplify its processes. “We’ve been able to consolidate functions into one unit. There’s just one management console. It’s less to learn and less to maintain,” Machols said. “For instance, it’s critical for us to be able to archive certain data and keep it in a WORM environment for seven years, or whatever the particular compliancy that it falls under states. If we were using optical drives for the WORM storage, we would need another product to replicate the data to a second location. This solution eliminates this step and provides us the ability to replicate without having to add another piece of hardware or software.”

THE OVERALL EXPERIENCE
From the standpoint of protecting its customers as well as its brand equity, CitiStreet is confident that it has the foundation in place to ensure that sensitive data will not be lost. From the design of the solution to implementation, the organization has been pleased with the results. “If you look at what we’ve implemented—all these products working together—you need a lot of expertise on how they talk. Having Datalink do the design and implementation has been very beneficial to us. They do this day in and day out. They have the expertise. They know how to integrate it, where the pitfalls are, who to engage, and what features are the best…and that really helps us roll this out in a timely fashion,” Machols said. “It’s much more economical for me to have Datalink integrate the solution than to train my resources to become experts for a one-time set up. That way, the IT staff is freed up to work on mission critical projects.”

INDUSTRY
Employee Benefits Provider
LOCATION
Jacksonville, Florida
(headquartered in Quincy,
Massachusetts)
SOLUTION
Disk-based WORM storage,
backup, and replication
DATALINK PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
• Analysis
• Design
• Implementation
• Support
BENEFITS
• Online replication that eliminates
the possibility of media being lost
• Increased backup performance
and recovery times
• Ease of management