Sharonview Federal Credit Union Upgrades to Unitrends D2D Appliance

Unitrends announced that Sharonview Federal Credit Union has recently upgraded to Unitrends’ latest data protection appliances after successfully relying on Unitrends for more than five years. With its new Unitrends solutions in place, the growing non-profit credit union has cut backup windows in half while assuring disaster recovery preparedness by vaulting its data to an offsite location using Unitrends technology.

Headquartered in Fort Mill, SC, Sharonview Federal Credit Union began as an employer-based credit union in the 1950’s. Today, Sharonview is a full-service, not-for-profit financial institution with assets of $900 million serving more than 59,000 members with 22 branches in South Carolina, North Carolina and New Jersey.

As it grew, Sharonview was facing a dramatically increasing quantity of data, an expanded network infrastructure, and storage environment complexity. In 2005, Sharonview decided it was time to get away from the credit union’s painstaking tape backup process. Sharonview’s tape backups were ‘a hassle’ to manage, requiring manual review of logs to determine whether backup jobs were successful. What’s worse, there was no way to fully recover a failed server, even after extensive investment in a new tape library and new tape backup software.

While seeking a new solution with better speed and reliability for up to 1TB of data, Sharonview also wanted to improve its disaster recovery readiness while also encrypting critical financial data to meet privacy and security requirements. After evaluating its options, Sharonview purchased disk-to-disk data protection units from Unitrends. Following a successful implementation in 2006 and efficient performance results ever since, Sharonview recently upgraded to Unitrends’ latest technology in 2009 to accommodate their growing data store. Now with three new Unitrends appliances in place, the growing credit union has cut their backup window in half.

“We were probably one of the early adopters of Unitrends,” said Mark Johnson, CIO, Sharonview Federal Credit Union. “Now after five years we are completely satisfied. When it was time to expand after five years, we didn’t even look anywhere else, we were happy with the Unitrends product.”

Today, Sharonview uses Unitrends to backup SANs and individual servers and to vault data to another location for disaster recovery assurance. It also uses the Unitrends Baremetal recovery feature for whole system protection, and the included Unitrends Exchange Agent for email protection. Backups are encrypted with InCrypt 256-AES encryption, delivering the integrated security required by this member-focused, and highly successful financial institution.

“When we migrated from tape to Unitrends five years ago we cut our backup way down, then cut it in half again when we upgraded to the latest Unitrends hardware earlier this year,” said Kevin Hughes, network engineer, Sharonview Federal Credit Union. “We invested in a SAN earlier this year, and are now using the Unitrends product to back up individual servers as well as our (new) SAN.”

“It’s always exciting to play a role in the business success of our customers,” said Maria Ellison, senior vice president, support, Unitrends. “Sharonview Federal Credit Union has been very pleased in their ability to perform individual file recovery in minutes versus hours with Unitrends while receiving both whole system local backups and offsite vaulting at a remote location for complete disaster recovery.”

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