Capital City Bank

Capital City Bank

Riverbed SteelHead Improves Recovery Point Objective for Capital City Bank

Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: CCBG) is one of the largest publicly traded financial services companies headquartered in Florida and has approximately $2.7 billion in assets. Replicating data had been a challenge for the company’s storage and network teams. With backup windows often exceeding 60 hours, CCBG turned to Riverbed SteelHead appliances, EMC CLARiiON and EMC MirrorView to achieve its business continuity and DR goals.

Challenge: Meeting business continuity and DR objectives

Capital City Bank Group (CCBG) designed a disaster recovery (DR) site out-of-state to meet its business continuity requirements. Following build-out of the new DR site, the IT team replicated Metavante check image files and some Jack Henry application files using a 50Mbps WAN link to the DR facility.

According to Lynne Jensen, vice president and IT network manager at CCBG, “It took 48-72 hours to replicate data to the EMC CLARiiON storage at our DR site.” Overcoming this slow performance, which was caused by high network latency while replicating seven terabytes of data, remained a challenge. The CCBG IT team needed to improve its recovery point objective (RPO), while avoiding costly bandwidth upgrades.

IN BRIEF

Challenges

• Design for a disaster recovery site out of state
• Replicate data faster and more often
• Avoid the ongoing expense of a WAN bandwidth upgrade

Solution

• Riverbed SteelHead wide area network (WAN) optimization appliance

Benefits

• Reduced replication time from 48-72 hours down to 4-6 hours
• Replicated Metavante and Jack Henry files to DR site
• Dramatically improved RP O while using existing bandwidth

Solution: WAN optimization improves recovery point objectives (RPO)

CCBG researched WAN optimization solutions to solve the latency issue, improve their RPO and avoid reoccurring bandwidth costs. “We tested four alternatives, and only Riverbed fulfilled our technology and business requirements. Riverbed’s performance, ease-of- management and simplicity to scale met our technical criteria.”Jensen added. “The performance of the SteelHead appliances at our DR site sold us on the solution. Riverbed being an EMC Select and EMC E-LAB-Tested Partner assured us of our decision.”

During the evaluation process with Riverbed in production, CCBG used SteelHead appliance features to pull reports. “We were in the early stages of evaluating WAN optimization, and we were not aware of how much dat  went over the network,” said Jensen. “The SteelHead appliance reports gave us new insight into how much data was being backed up and reduced, and GUI was easy to use.”

After thorough testing, CCBG selected the Riverbed SteelHead solution. Jensen’s team was so pleased with the results of the evaluation that they asked to keep the test appliances in production to meet its business continuity and RPO goals until CCBG’s new appliances arrived.

Benefits: Replication speeds up to 12x allowing bank to recover data quicker

With the SteelHead appliances between CCBG’s main office in Tallahassee, Florida, and its DR site in Georgia, the company’s time to replicate to the recovery site was reduced from 48-72 hours down to 4-6 hours. “We are assured that after a disaster, our business can be up and running within 24 hours, because the SteelHead appliances are moving gigabytes of data versus terabytes of data throughout the day,” commented Jensen.

“If we did not deploy SteelHead appliances to replicate our data, we would have had to upgrade our network to a 100MB or greater pipe, and the reoccurring bandwidth cost would almost double our DR bandwidth budget. More bandwidth would still not solve latency or data issues, but only give us a bigger circuit,” she explained.

By improving replication speeds by up to 12x to CCBG’s DR site, Jensen can focus on other IT projects. “We have been successful in virtualizing 80% of our servers and now look to optimize our branch offices with SteelHead appliances. Riverbed allows us to replicate more data between our sites by running high-availbility without impacting performance for our end-users,” she shared.

“The performance of the SteelHead appliances at our DR site sold us on the solution. Riverbed being an EMC select and EMC E-LAB-Tested Partner assured us of our decision.”

“If we did not deploy SteelHead appliances to replicate our data, we would have had to upgrade our network to a 100MB and the reoccurring brandwidth cost would almost double our DR banwidth budget.”