Mennonite Mutual Aid uses storage virtualization to ensure cost-effective business continuity

This Best Practice is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.

Company:
Mennonite Mutual Aid (MMA), headquartered in Goshen, IN, helps people integrate their finances with faith values by providing a range of financial and insurance products to members of the Mennonite Church denomination. Offering its members insurance, banking, investments and financial advice, MMA serves both individuals and affiliated organizations.

The problem:
MMA successfully transitioned from a sprawling Windows and IBM server environment with direct-attached storage to a tiered, virtual infrastructure with a remote disaster recovery (DR) site. It accomplished this by working with its partner, MapleTronics Computers, to implement FalconStor Software's and Network Storage Server (NSS) and Virtual Tape Library (VTL) plus VMware.

The solution:
The FalconStor VTL was purchased to resolve the backup tape transport issues. MMA has almost completed testing, which indicates that VTL will reduce the backup window significantly – down to 1/8-1/10 of the current window. When implementation is complete, data will be replicated to the VTL appliance at the disaster recovery site, eliminating physical tape transport. MMA expects that most of the Windows backup will be replaced by FalconStor snapshots and replication.

Who provided this information:
Richard Plank, Network Operating System Administrator, Mennonite Mutual Aid.

How it worked:
MMA needed to greatly improve its backup window times and manage its server sprawl concerns. There was a strong push from MMA's management team to ensure that the website and these applications were not only highly available, but performing optimally, with no impact from backup operations. The new system lets MMA schedule backup at any time of the day. The company’s sales force now has faster access to information, allowing them to better service customers and increase sales activities.

Rules for success:

• Maximize Return on Assets (ROA) by virtualizing and unifying tiered storage
• Eliminate unnecessary capacity purchases
• Provision using any protocol required
• Guarantee virtualization project success by enabling key virtual-environment scenarios
• Optimize RTO and RPO by instant recovery of consistent data images

Classic mistakes:

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