UK Vanquis Bank With id7 and NetApp

id7, the UK-based storage technology company, announced a customer testimonial at Vanquis Bank, endorsing the company’s technology, service, and longevity of solutions.

Vanquis Bank is one of the UKs leading financial organisations, specialising in the provision of credit and finance services to individuals with limited or no credit histories and those re-building their credit histories. With over 500 employees spread across their London and Chatham offices, and over 800,000 customers, data grows prolifically with Vanquis facing around 50% year on year growth rates.

Being a key financial organisation, Vanquis Bank is tightly controlled for all aspects of compliance so all data needs to be secured safely and remain constantly accessible across a seven year timeframe. These factors combined with a complex and evolving IT structure, led Vanquis Bank to seek a backup and restore solution that could regulate, future proof and fully automate backups to achieve fully compliant, high performance backups that moved away from spanning the whole weekend, plus incrementals in the week.
 
The solution was actually closer to home than expected with an existing id7 BK4 Unified Disk Backup solution already within the data centre, which although configured and operational, remained solely to serve basic storage LUNS for backup. Andy Taylor, Infrastructure Manager, Vanquis Bank, realised that as one of the only solutions on the market today that supports disk LUN, file share and Virtual Tape Library (VTL) configurations in the same appliance, that only a fraction of the BK4 functionality was being utilised and none of its automation features.
 
Working with id7, the Team set about considering how the BK4 could be implemented to not only secure disparate islands of backup data but to ultimately secure the entire business including all major critical applications. These  inter-departmental applications include the 5TB SQL database holding every client  transaction, SharePoint, server images, log files, file servers, Exchange Server 2007. Server virtualisation has occurred within the Bank so the environment is both physical and virtual with storage being served through a NetApp shared Storage Area Network.
 
To customise the BK4, Andy worked with key engineers at id7 to unleash the appliances’ full potential. He takes up the story: "From the outset the support from id7 has been second to none. It’s rare to find an organisation that will go out of their way as much as the team did to accommodate our customised requests."
 
The results of the ongoing collaboration and tweaking were immediate on the backup window. Today true differential backups are now seamlessly conducted, in fact, around 8 differentials occur each day far exceeding initial expectations. With the 10GB iSCSI Interfaces within the BK4, the speed is impressive.

Andy notes: "It’s fair to say that with the BK4 fully up and running, the speed and functionality literally blew our minds. Our backups literally fly and there are not many libraries out there that boast the same impressive credentials as we now have."

Backups are now scheduled and less circumspect with timed differential backups every couple of hours. Even the full 8TB weekend backups take a fraction of the time. There has also been a knock on effect for compliance and retrieval. No longer does the Bank have to locate, isolate and retrieve a single file from within various parts of the organisation.

Today the BK4 seamlessly and automatically retrieves single files. And because of the Clone2Tape pinpoint technology within the BK4, whilst the backups benefit from the performance and flexibility of disk, the automated queuing and migrating technology creates physical tape copies to match the Banks’ policy and maintain application catalogue consistency. Restores to the system are now near instantaneous. What would have taken at least a day to locate a file via a physical tape and produce the restore now takes minutes with the nearline BK4 system.
 
Vanquis Bank have just placed another order for a third BK4 disk backup solution to run within the Chatham office. And it’s not just the IT department that have been thrilled with the purchases. From a business perspective, the initial capital outlay has been affordable, especially when you compare the cost of a similar recognised brand.

Andy summarises: "We viewed this as a fresh opportunity to complement our Tier 1 storage brands with a feature rich, affordable alternative that avoids the big brand costly price tag. It has turned out to be both a first class business and technology decision."