Washington Trust Selects EMC and VMware

EMC
Corporation announced that The Washington Trust Company,
the nation’s oldest community bank, has built a private cloud with EMC unified storage, EMC backup and recovery ,
and VMware vSphere virtualization and
cloud infrastructure solutions.

With a 90% virtualized infrastructure, the bank
has achieved faster delivery of new server and unified storage resources,
substantial cost savings and improved backup and disaster recovery of core
applications, including Oracle and Microsoft Exchange.

Customer Benefits:

• Improved simplicity – servers and unified storage are
  provisioned in a few hours compared to weeks with their previous storage
  solution.
• Cost savings – and return on investment-operational
  and maintenance costs decreased substantially due to a 15:1 server consolidation.
• Increased performance – 90% virtualized private cloud
  infrastructure based on EMC unified storage, VMware virtualization and cloud
  infrastructure technology delivered faster response times for branch employees
  and Internet banking customers who access online check images.
• Better efficiency – 95% (20x) reduction in backup data
  capacity requirements as well as rapid restores and network-efficient
  replication for disaster recovery were achieved with EMC Data Domain systems.

Unified Storage and VMware Server Consolidation
in the Cloud
Washington Trust’s growth strategy was beginning to present
challenges to its existing IT infrastructure. Managing and scaling their
previous IT environment was becoming a more time consuming and expensive
process.

Washington Trust decided to build a private cloud using EMC
unified storage and VMware vSphere virtualization and cloud infrastructure
solutions. They virtualized environments using VMware technology including
Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server-based check and statement imaging, loan
processing, as well as Oracle test and development servers.

"After we moved to a cloud computing environment we
began seeing exponentially better performance," said Mark Smithey,
Washington Trust Vice President of Technology Services. "This made a big
difference to branch customer service representatives and online banking
customers who need immediate access to check images."

"Now, our server and unified storage resources are
ready in a few hours at no additional IT operational cost. Because we
virtualized 90% of our IT infrastructure, we reduced our servers from 50 to
just 4, resulting in additional cost savings in our data center
operations. With our EMC and VMware
cloud, IT has become an enabler of growth and banking services to our customers,"
said Smithey. "Supporting our users
in a faster, more efficient and agile way has been amazing. We can develop
strategic plans and solutions that will allow us to scale three to five years
down the line."

The Bank also plans to virtualize its Oracle core banking
servers as well as any new servers. In the next phase of its journey to cloud,
Washington Trust is looking at virtualizing desktops with VMware View and a
Vblock Infrastructure Platform from VCE, the Virtual Computing Company, formed by
Cisco and EMC, with investments from VMware and Intel.

Next-Generation Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
Washington Trust’s tape backups were also becoming a
challenge for the Bank because of their environment’s enormous data
growth. Specifically, backup windows
were increasing and backup and recovery was becoming less reliable. As a result, Washington Trust evaluated new
backup options and selected EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems.

Washington Trust replaced tape backup with two Data Domain
systems. One Data Domain system protects local backup data and replicates it to
a second Data Domain system at the remote location for disaster recovery.

"Our Data Domain backup systems are core to our
disaster recovery strategy," said Smithey. "Not only did we eliminate tapes, but our data reduction rate is
95%, meaning our backup storage capacity requirements are 20-times less than
before. It’s also much faster and easier
to restore. A typical 10 megabyte file
used to take over an hour to restore. With Data Domain, we get it back in five
minutes. And our backups are fully replicated to our remote site which allows
us to sleep easier at night."

Washington Trust depends on EMC RecoverPoint continuous
remote replication (CRR) to replicate business-critical applications, such as
Exchange, Oracle core banking and other applications. VMware vCenter Site
Recovery Manager integrates with RecoverPoint to automate disaster recovery of
the bank’s virtual infrastructure.

"With our EMC and VMware powered private cloud if we
need to switch over to our remote site, we just press a few buttons and
everything is recovered in minutes compared to the hours it used to take,"
said Smithey. "For example, our remote copy of our Oracle database and
primary database are synchronized within five minutes or less when before there
was a 30-60 minute lag."