Sevier County Bank Selected Scale Computing

Scale Computing, Inc., a provider of hyper-converged solutions, announced that Sevier County Bank (SCB), a banking and financial services firm established in 1909, has selected Scale’s HC3 Virtualization Platform to upgrade its information systems and support the bank’s strategic technology plans as it serves the community in its next hundred years.

Headquartered in Sevierville, TN, SCB has six locations providing high service level loan and deposit solutions to businesses and individuals in the region. To support these critical services for its 75 employees and thousands of customers, SCB uses three Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. applications for functions like check imaging and archive, data security and compliance, and reporting. SCB’s key requirements were an updated virtualized infrastructure with HA to defend against failures and downtime, and data protection and DR capabilities that met the financial industry’s exacting standards. With an IT staff of two, simplified installation, migration, and ongoing maintenance were also desirable features.

With physical servers nearing the end of their useful life, SCB evaluated a traditional virtualization solution using VMware running on host servers connected into a shared storage environment. However, the estimated cost of $180,000 for hardware at a single location was expensive and financially irresponsible.

Josh Carr, assistant VP, IT manager and systems administrator, SCB, learned about Scale Computing’s HC3 product, a hyper-converged solution combining servers, storage, virtualization and management into a single system. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, the upgrade to Scale’s HC3 came in around one-third that cost – an easy sell to the bank’s officers.

Aside from the cost comparison, SCB gained a scalable, simple, and highly available infrastructure that is as easy to set up and manage as a single server.

“We love that the HC3 is so simple to use, and we love the interface,” said Carr. “The Scale nodes were a piece of cake. Once we got the switches in place, it was up and running that day.“

SCB implemented an HC2000 cluster at their primary site, which alone provides HA for any VMs created on the system. The bank also installed an HC1000 cluster at its DR branch, and uses HC3’s replication to ensure compliance in the highly regulated banking industry. The process for replicating and cloning VMs is easy enough that SCB can also test their DR plan with ease. 

“If the Main Office experiences a disaster, we could take the replicated VMs at our DR location and clone those to spin them up with little to no downtime. We’re estimating that only about five minutes worth of recent data changes would potentially be lost,” said Carr.

“Sevier County Bank made an intelligent choice to avoid the out-of-control licensing costs of virtualization software, and the headaches of managing external storage, in favor of HC3,” said Jeff Ready, CEO, Scale Computing. “As a single, appliance-like solution, HC3 is ideal for these environments moving aging physical servers to virtualized ones, and adding enterprise-strength data services, while keeping it simple, cost-sustainable, and scalable for the long term – perhaps even another century.“