Leading Banking and Financial Institution Switches to StorTrends for Ease of Management, Data Protection and Asset Optimization
NORCROSS, GA – (August 25, 2015) – StorTrends®, the data storage division of American Megatrends, Inc. (AMI) and an industry leader in all-flash arrays (AFA), hybrid storage, and spinning disk solutions, today announced that FSG Bank, headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee, has increased IOPS speed five times over its previous backup system after switching to StorTrends’ high performance storage.
Prior to implementing StorTrends, FSG Bank-whose approximately 300 employees serve the banking and financial needs within the communities of Tennessee and Northern Georgia-had struggled to efficiently maintain its existing storage resources. The bank had recently realized a substantial increase in profits, with nearly $50 million in loan growth and over $1 million of improvement in non-interest expense. For the IT department, which is charged with supporting the bank’s internal IT requirements, as well as maintaining all customer support systems, this success created even greater data storage challenges.
With a complex IT environment consisting of 70 servers (the majority of which are virtual), Juniper network switches, a myriad of databases, a Zimbra mail server, and various banking software, FSG Bank needed to rely on outsourcing the core of its work.The operation was just getting by on a 20 TB storage area network (SAN), with a secondary unit in a disaster recovery (DR) site for failover.
Needing more flexibility and control over the environment, the IT department compared various systems and chose StorTrends based on the product’s capability, price, and support plan. In terms of capability, StorTrends’ data-tiering allowed the organization to implement three tiers of storage and avoid overburdening its storage resources. Tier I was used to support the bank’s mission-critical data (accessed hourly and daily), Tier II was employed to manage frequently accessed but non-priority data, and Tier III was used to serve its backup and archiving processes.
“The primary production datastore and most of the VMs were strategically migrated over to the StorTrends solution as quickly as possible and the results were immediate,” said Kevin Turner, Systems Administrator, FSG Bank. “The speed is definitely impressive. Our IOPS are almost five times faster than the previous solution.”
Turner also highlighted that the outstanding technical support has been key to the bank’s high satisfaction with StorTrends. “With StorTrends, the support agents know the product inside-out,” said Turner. “The representatives go above and beyond the call of duty and show a total commitment to getting things fixed. We’ve seen firsthand that an excellent product, at an affordable cost, with great technical support is just StorTrends’ way of doing business.”
“For organizations like FSG Bank, StorTrends high-performance storage delivers the exceptional performance and functionality necessary to optimize resources, boost productivity, and ensure data protection,” said Justin Bagby, Director of the StorTrends division of American Megatrends, Inc. (AMI). “What’s more, StorTrends provides the flexibility to grow any organization’s storage environment as needed, with the high capacity that will meet business and budget requirements well into the future-whether those call for all-flash, hybrid flash, or spinning disk.”
FSG Bank provides customers with services in retail and commercial banking, trust and investment management, mortgage banking, and financial planning. For more information on FSG Bank, please visit: http://www.fsgbank.com.
For further details on FSG Bank’s StorTrends deployment, please read the case study found at: http://www.stortrends.com/resources/customer-stories/.