1. | |December 2014
1CIOReview
CIOREVIEW.COM
CIOReviewDECEMBER 10- 2014
T h e N a v i g a t o r f o r E n t e r p r i s e S o l u t i o n s
EMC SpECIal
Eric D. Noonan,
CEO
CyberSheath
Services
International:
Making the right
cyber security
moves
CyberSheath
Services
International:
Making the right
cyber security
moves
| |December 2014
40CIOReview
You Have Aligned IT with
Business – Are You Protecting
the Business?By Karen Sullivan, CIO/CSO, Publix Employees Federal Credit Union
T
he financial industry must have the appropriate
technologies in place to quickly adapt and change
to evolving regulations, technology advancements
and business process changes. PEFCU’s IT
department must be visionaries to keep up
with rapidly changing technology and maintain regulatory
compliance. This requires long-term strategic planning and
strong teamwork within the organization. Performing an
analysis of the five year business plan and goals allows IT to
strategically plan for those changes and determine the impact
to the infrastructure and security of the business.
PEFCU invested in EMC and Cisco technologies ensuring
we were responsive enough to face any challenge. Our strategy
evolved to keep up with technology and regulations we must
Karen Sullivan
CIO Insight
adhere to. In choosing vendors, most notably, EMC, we provide
members and staff maximum uptime, security, and performance.
More importantly, strategic planning for the growth of data and
software applications is considered along with data retention,
backup, archiving, and data security.
PEFCU has branches in Florida and Georgia with centralized
IT at our Lakeland, Florida office. Our Disaster Recovery site
in Jacksonville is an exact mirror of the Lakeland office with a
Tertiary site in Norcross GA, which hosts a VNX system for critical
applications only.
Challenges in Protecting the Business
For business continuity/disaster recovery, we installed several
EMC products to protect our business. Disaster Recovery is “top-
of-mind” and availability is critical. We require 365/24/7 uptime
for our customer facing e-services applications. In a competitive
market we must differentiate ourselves from competitors through
the use of technology. In order to protect the business and financial
data we have had to evolve our Archiving, Backup and Recovery
to reduce complexity, recurring costs, and expand data protection
service levels.
Tomeetbusinessandfinancialgoalsweconsolidatedbackupand
archiving on to EMC Data Domain
appliances (DDRs) and replicated
that data to 3 sites, maintaining data
integrity and reducing business risk
by ensuring quick data restoration.
Operationally we improved
replication performance, reduced
RTO for backup and Disaster
Recovery and operational efficiency
by streamlining management of
backup and recovery operations.
Environment & Existing
Applications
We use EMC VMware Vsphere
| |December 2014
41CIOReview
In choosing vendors,
most notably, EMC, we
provide members and
staff maximum uptime,
security and performance
ESXi 5.0 on a Cisco UCS Blade system running 120 VMs. This
system is attached to an EMC VMAX 10k with a mix of Flash,
Fibre Channel and SATA drives using Fast VP.
PEFCU implemented an EMC Enterprise Storage Network
that comprises two EMC VMAX 10K storage arrays located in
Lakeland and Jacksonville. Each unit is configured with a total of
40 TB useable capacity.
The units employ three distinct storage tiers using EMC
FAST technology to migrate data amongst the tiers depending
on usage. Tier 1 is the highest performing and contains 1 TB of
EFD/Flash Drives. 15K fiber channel drives (18 TB) on Tier
2 and 7200 RPM SATA drives (21 TB) on Tier 3. EMC FAST
technology uses sophisticated algorithms to determine proper tier
placement for data and dynamically moves data amongst the tiers
to ensure optimal performance.
The ESN is comprised of two Cisco MDS 9148 switches in
Lakeland, two Cisco MDS 9124 switches in Jacksonville and
EMC Recover Point Appliances (RPA). Each switch constitutes
a complete VSAN in the storage network providing a logical
security boundary. PEFCU’s ESN employs the concept of
mapping, zoning and LUN masking to restrict and enforce access
to SAN Data.
EMC RPAs are designed to incorporate Disaster Recover/
Business continuity with one
cluster at Lakeland and another
cluster at Jacksonville, allowing bi-
directional SAN based replication.
Each cluster consists of four 1U
Recover Point appliances that
provide asynchronous replication
between Lakeland and Jacksonville
across a 200 Mbps Ethernet
Private Line (EVPL). This mode
of replication sends point in time
copies and allows for the recovery
of replicas on a very granular level
and protection against replication of
deletes or data corruption from site
to site so we can return to a restore point an instant before the deletion
or corruption occurred.
These RPA’s work with the EMC VMware SRM solution to
providing an efficient disaster failover/failback solution requiring
minimal user intervention. This allows for the failover of one or more
VMs from Lakeland to Jacksonville and back.
Archiving, Backup and Recovery Overview
The Credit Union employs several other EMC products to protect the
business and member data.
SourceOne was implemented for archiving and 5 year data
retention of e-mails. Exchange E-mails are journaled and SourceOne
pulls these emails from the Journal to a staging area on the server
and written to the SourceOne archive on the DDRs. SourceOne
provides E-discovery for all archived content and Email supervision
for regulatory compliance.
After 90 days, emails are shortcutted and represented as a stub in
Outlook clients. After one year the stub is removed from Outlook and
Exchange and the user can search for e-mails using many parameters
in the web client of SourceOne.
All applications write to production DDRs and backups replicate
from the production DDRs to the hot and warm sites using cascading
replication. The basic diagram of our current VMAX environment
includes Recover Point and Cisco MDS switches along with
Site Recovery Manager (SRM), allowing for full site failover in
approximately 1 hour.
VMDKs are backed up to the DDR’s and EMC DiskXtender
backs up our Imaging system to the DDRs as well.
Data is written to DDRs over Ethernet via CIFS shares or NFS
mounts.Theretentionofthefilesisdefinedbythebackupapplications,
not Data Domain. All data on the appliances are deduplicated and
compressed using CPU and memory, is continually verified by the
appliance, and available whenever needed. DDRs maintain statistics
on all content written and report their overall statistics and health
daily.
Data Domain Statistics
An example of data reported upon is the amount of data written
before deduplication, as well as disk capacity
TCO savings achieved are the consolidation of archive data
onto DDRs as the sets are deduplicated together, resulting in disk
capacity savings overall and reduction ratios directly correlate to
WAN bandwidth savings, as data is replicated deduplicated between
facilities.
Because Data Domain is used as a NAS, many applications can
write to it over Ethernet directly. This results in software license cost
savings, as applications can write backups directly to DDRs without
requiring additional backup software costs.
In summary, EMC provides PEFCU industry leading hardware
and software for application protection, backup, recovery, archive,
and compliance.