North Island Credit Union Chooses Violin SSD Arrays

Violin Memory, Inc.
helped North Island Credit
Union accelerate data processing by three times, providing faster and
efficient banking services to its members.

North Island Credit Union, based in San Diego, California,
understood its storage regime was antiquated and adversely affecting daily IT
operations. As the credit union grew, so did nightly and month-end batch
processing times, eventually spilling over into the next business day
transactions, hindering the company from improving member services and preventing the IT department from meeting service
level agreements. Solid state storage solutions, on the other hand, are made to
solve the performance data processing issues often encountered in the banking
and financial services industries.

To address its challenge, North Island turned to Violin Memory’s
3200 flash Memory Arrays.

"The proof-of-concept results were
stunning," said Michael Glogowski, assistant VP of core network
systems of North Island Credit Union. "The
times were unbelievable. Batch reports that took five hours now ran in 90
minutes. Upload jobs that used to run in 90 minutes now took 15 minutes."

North Island moved forward with deploying Violin’s 3200 Memory
Arrays. The 3200 series is a redundant, modular 3U flash memory array
that scales to 20TB of SLC NAND flash and provides the
industry price/performance attributes. It is the first in the 3000
series of memory arrays that scales to more than 240TB in a rack with performance
topping two million IOPS. The enterprise 3200 includes
hardware-based flash RAID across hot-swappable memory modules to provide
data protection and spike free latency of less than 100 microseconds.

Before deployment of the 3200 Memory Arrays, the North Island
Credit Union IT department was unable to accommodate requests from business
departments to reschedule night batch processing. Now, nightly bath jobs that
previously ran from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. now run from 6:15 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Month-end batch processing that ran from 7:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. now jets
from 7:00 p.m. until midnight. The performance increase allows North Island to
reallocate third shift operations and go lights out.

North Island currently runs its core banking application on Violin’s
flash Memory Arrays, but the IT department plans to migrate the credit union’s
document management system to Violin Memory as well.

According to Glogowski,"The
ROI payback is in six months."

Flash Memory Arrays are changing the data center for
companies like AOL, Revlon, Tagged.com, Juniper and HP through its
patent-pending flash vRAID technology.