Sometimes a business does so well that results outpace network systems. LendingClub Corp. is just such a story. In the last quarter of 2011, LendingClub issued 42,000 loans valued at $480 million. By the fourth quarter, close to six years later, the company processed 2.7 million loans with a total value in excess of $33 billion.

But LendingClub was saddled with a legacy backup solution that was woefully behind the needs of its growing business. “With the traditional backup system, if it was successful, it took days,” recalled Steven McCaa (pictured), director of infrastructure and end user services at LendingClub. “That’s not tenable. It was time to look outside the box and shake things up a little bit.”

McCaa spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss his company’s quest for a more modern recovery and backup solution and how Cohesity Inc.’s technology made a difference for the business. (* Disclosure below.)

Backup for data-heavy models

For McCaa and LendingClub’s information technology staff, looking outside the box meant finding a more modern solution. The company offers peer-to-peer personal loans and the opportunity to invest in the lending process as well, a business model that depends heavily on carefully researched data models.

LendingClub turned to Cohesity, which specializes in hyperconverged secondary storage solutions for data assets. “They’re not just a backup appliance,” McCaa said. “They do have a file system in there, and we could replicate our old backup jobs into Cohesity.”

Cohesity’s file system guarantees data resiliency at scale with consistency. This was especially attractive to LendingClub since its data analysts would often build complex models, toss them when they didn’t appear to work, but then try to restore them later for another project.

“The competitive differentiator was that file system,” McCaa explained. “Being able to move our old backups directly into the system and use our old backup software meant that we didn’t have to do restore and re-backup or anything crazy like that.”

LendingClub also uses Cohesity for disaster recovery testing, which includes moving some operations away from primary storage. “We’re doing our migrations so we can have disaster recovery in the cloud,” McCaa said. “It’s a very modern architecture.”

Watch the entire video interview with McCaa below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Cohesity Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cohesity nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE