As an EMC practitioner, Independent Bank represents a company whose customers rely on the bank’s ability to protect their information. At the same time, the bank is expected to grant those customers access to their data, day and night, from a PC or mobile device. Tom McKowen, VP of Information Technology at Independent Bank, visited theCUBE at EMC World 2014 to talk over his business-specific challenges and the solutions he implemented when it came to storing and protecting his customer’s sensitive financial data.

• How IT facilitates Independent Banks’ changing business needs

As part an Independent Bank with a growing paperless environment, McKowen’s IT team has been challenged to “improve business processes to streamline things to try to make it easier and quicker for our customers to transact with the business.”

To be able to provide customers access to their account at all hours, in addition to access to older information like check images, is a challenge that McKowen has embraced. It requires “data availability 24/7, internally and externally” and also means “keeping data online for a long time.”

Data Protection? “Nailed It.”

To overcome those challenges, McKowen decided to become an active/active data center, leveraging EMC VPLEX, RecoverPoint, Atmos in their virtual environment. Implementing these technologies meant their transformation “from a four-hour RPO, fifteen minute RTO to basically a zero downtime environment for the bank and [its] customers.”

Although VPLEX is the primary product Independent Bank uses to protect data and meet its RPOs and RTOs, McKowen also added that behind VPLEX, “Atmos is sitting behind for the archive data, so it’s object-oriented. We have multiple Atmos in our environment, so for the stale content that the customers may need to reference, such as check images, they’re going to come in and hit Atmos for that 0 – 90 day file data, that’s going to be on the Vplex.”

• When it comes to tiers, divide and conquer

On of McKowen’s most complex tasks was to align “the expense to the business with the requirement to the business.” For Independent Bank, one of the key features of their storage system had to be “near instantaneous recovery for business-critical applications.”

McKowen decided to separate his system based on what makes the most sense for the bank for two reasons: cost and the ability to provide services. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the business’ needs by clearly communicating was essential to the decision making process: “specifically, that if they were without this application in these time frames, could they still continue business without suffering?” The end result left Independent Bank with a two-tier system:

Tier 1: High-priority data is stored on tier one on a VPLEX. This includes “files associated with customer-facing points: check imaging, the ability to transact with checks coming into the bank, and mortgage processing — all of those critical business applications that have data associated with them.” Tier 1 also has to include some essential back-end, business-facing applications that keep the bank running.

Tier 2: Housing information that is “not critical, not priority” on Recoverpoint, tier two data are “not customer-facing, they’re not going to drive a business process that absolutely has to be there in that four-hour window.”

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• Where does Avamar fit in?

Because Independent Bank is heavily virtualized, McKowen says that Avamar has been a particularly nice fit with their VPLEX and “therefore, the Recoverpoint splitter for Vplex was only in the secondary site for going off to basically a third site. We didn’t have a third site in our portfolio and so in order to get that crash-consistent backup capability, Avamar layers that in there uniquely.”

McKowen also mentioned Avamar’s most attractive abilities, including snapshot: “it has the ability to snapshot the virtual data to give you that crash-consistent protection. So that was a layered approach to cover ourselves to make sure that if there was that instance, we could have crash-consistent availability of all of the data within the same time frames.”

Aligning IT to meet business challenges

Commenting on where data protection-as-a-Service needs a little more work, McKowen mentioned “I see the fit being a little more of a challenge […] on the new business requests coming in for new applications, new platforms, or changes to that data set. That’s a little bit more unique, where you’re going to see some challenges around trying to redefine those key points.”

When asked about his concerns, McKowen replied that Independent bank is easing worries about service provider caused outages by moving “more towards that software-defined data center to reduce the impact points.”

If he could “do it over again,” McKowen said, he would have vetted VPLEX “out a little bit further — it took about six months of growing pain to get solutions that fully mapped out and functional to where it needed to be truly that zero downtime environment.” He also mentioned that he “would have done a little bit more on the business side in terms of validating some of the business processes. We had a few of them slip through the cracks that ended up getting vetted out in the process.”

• Using ViPR to redefine IT

Vellante asked McKowen for his thoughts on ViPR, to which McKowen responded that it is “a unique play into transforming and redefining IT” in the direction of the software-defined data center.

McKowen also mentioned that ViPR gives businesses the ability to “quickly provision and automate storage processes and improve IT service delivery to the business model.” While ViPR facilitates automation, it also makes it easier to get “under the hood,” meaning that IT professionals don’t have to spend as much time “defining storage and mapping storage to business applications.”

• EMC as a one-stop shop solutions provider

Convenience and confidence keep Independent Bank a loyal EMC customers: “When I looked at their tight integration with VMWare and other partners and players, they brought a whole solutions stack to the table.” Independent Bank uses “Vplex, Recoverpoint, Avamar, Atmos, Source One for archival recovery.”

McKowen added: “I have one-stop shopping to go to with one provider that gives me that benefit.” An internal transformation helped McKowen’s IT department to “meet business requirements and deliver that service.” They’ve defined and met key metrics “in terms of what is critical to the business for uptime and recover to map that solution set.”

• Upcoming IT Initiatives at Independent Bank

Like many IT executives, McKowen is interested in infrastructure as a service and IT as a service. At the same time, also similar many in the IT industry, he’s asked to “do more with less — that could be software-defined data center, it could be partners providing services that augment.”

Regardless, his end goal is reduce “big capex expenditures and go with a more open fix cost” for his business.