Minnwest Bank Deploys Riverbed Steelhead Rather Rhan Cisco WAAS

Riverbed Technology, Inc.
(RVBD) announced that Minnwest Bank has deployed Riverbed Steelhead
appliances at each of its two data centers.

With Riverbed WAN optimization, Minnwest Bank has executed a DR strategy that protects more than eight TB of company data
every day. Minnwest Bank has improved business continuity and now meets a
recovery point objective of one hour or less, and in most cases approximately
15 minutes. With accelerated DR processes, Minnwest is able to reduce bandwidth
utilization, decrease bandwidth costs and reduce IT management costs. More
important, Minnwest is able to process transactions faster, thus ensuring
better customer service.

Minnwest
Bank, founded in 1987, is a financial institution focused on local retail
customers and small businesses, including many families and family-owned
businesses such as farms, retailers, residential construction, small
manufacturing, distributors and commercial builders. With more than 9,000
Internet banking customers and 300 businesses online, Minnwest Bank has become
a partner with 25 locations in 19 communities throughout Minnesota and
South Dakota. With more than 15,000 debit and ATM card users and 35,000
telephone banking transactions per month, any unplanned downtime could cause
difficulties for its customers and have an adverse effect on its reputation as
a trusted partner in the community.

"We realized that our nightly cobbling of
tape backup and sending them off-site was a time-intensive process that was not
reliable and not viable long-term," said Jonathan Schiller, chief
executive officer, MinnData, the IT operations group within Minnwest Bank.
"If we were to have a disaster, then
possibly thousands of customer transactions could be lost, with the most recent
data available from 4:00 p.m. the previous day. We needed a solution that would
simplify the administration, and improve data protection operations and
effectiveness."

As a first
step, Minnwest Bank started using Dell EqualLogic for replication of VMware on
its HP servers to replace its legacy method of nightly tape-based backups.
However, Minnwest needed a process to increase the throughput to accommodate
the replication and the 13 GB of data across the WAN, which on
occasion peaked at 200 GB. Additionally, to support future data growth
requirements, Schiller wanted the new solution to accommodate 22 GB-per hour
sustained load transfers. After examining its options, Minnwest
determined that WAN optimization was the best solution for its needs. Minnwest
Bank tested and evaluated alternatives, including Cisco Wide Area Application
Services (WAAS), but deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances to
optimize its data backups across the WAN to its data centers.

With the
Steelhead appliances, the financial institution was able to increase its
replication and backup throughput while decreasing bandwidth utilization. As a
result, Minnwest Bank has a DR strategy which enables the company to
protect more data faster, minimizing the possibility of losing significant
amounts of financial data. Now Minnwest Bank is replicating more than eight TB
of data in as little as 15 minutes, in place of the labor-intensive tape backup
process that was done manually and had to be sent off-site.

The Riverbed
WAN optimization solution has also enabled Minnwest Bank to provide its
employees LAN-like performance for its critical
applications, including Fiserv, a set of core financial services applications,
and Microsoft Exchange. Overall, the financial institution has decreased
bandwidth utilization 55 percent. With the QoS features in
Steelhead appliances, Minnwest Bank was able to prioritize between its critical
applications and replication traffic to ensure sufficient bandwidth where
necessary during peak business hours. Now, the company is able to better
service its customers, collaboration is more effective and employees are
happier and more productive.

"We cut our hardware costs by virtualizing.
We automated our replication across the WAN, and we have more reliable DR
operations with Riverbed that enables us to protect more data, more frequently
and recover faster," says Schiller. "On top of it all, Steelhead appliances enable us to accelerate the
speed of inter-office data transfers and collaboration. That not only makes our
employees happier, as they are able to work faster, but it enables us to
provide better customer service, which means customers are spending less time
waiting in line, on the phone and banking online."