GLENDALE, Calif. — Thousands of credit unions back up business data onto magnetic tapes, but Los Angeles FCU (LAFCU) here never liked that practice.
"We really needed to get off of tape," said Brian Todd, IT manager.
Like so many credit unions, LAFCU did tape backups of non-core data for decades, Todd noted. LAFCU's backups took 10 hours each night, and once the nightly backups were verified as successful, the CU had to lug the tapes to its remote disaster recovery site the next morning. In the event of a business interruption, full recovery would have been time-consuming - and questionable.
In January, the CU abandoned nightly backups for data in its content management application. Now, the $696-million LAFCU replicates the data in real time, transmitting it over a network straight to disk servers at the CU's remote site. The icing on the cake is that a template of the content management application itself is also stored remotely.
"Our data is created, sent to our imaging server, then replicated within a minute with no failures," explained Todd. Replication is gentle on bandwidth, he added.
LAFCU uses InMage Scout, an application and data recovery platform offered by Santa Clara, Calif.-based InMage, to replicate documents stored in its content-management and imaging application. Such documents include reports, loans, receipts and membership applications. InMage also provides failover for the content-management application.
Thus, tape backups and restores at LAFCU have evolved into a ready-to-use, off-site data and application image for disaster recovery. Full disaster recovery from the image would take only minutes, Todd said.
InMage makes it easy for Todd to check the data to make sure it is replicated consistently and thoroughly, he said. "We have completed test snapshots of the data and done data recovery testing. The results were positive and all expected data was present."
With daily tape backups, Todd said he was always at risk of missing the current day's worth of data if he needed to recover the CU. A tape recovery could take days, he continued. "At one point, I did lose enough data to where it became a point of concern," he said. "It took three or four days to get all of the data back into the system."
The daily tape could break or be corrupt, or get lost or stolen, Todd said. LAFCU replaced tape drives at least twice annually. The tape problem was only going to get worse at LAFCU, where the volume of data is growing by nearly 10% every year, said Todd. The CU's current InMage data set weighs in at about 340 gigabytes, he said.
By avoiding courier and tape storage fees and the costs of replacement tapes and tape drive parts and maintenance, LAFCU is saving about $12,000 per year, he said.
InMage discourages the tape-backup protocol for two main reasons: first, most data recovery requires random access, while tapes only support sequential access, resulting in longer recovery times, suggested Eric Burgener, SVP-marketing at InMage. Second, tape drives only accept data at one speed, and backups are usually slower than that speed, resulting in lengthy backup times and questionable reliability.
LAFCU may extend InMage to replicate data created by the CU's office productivity software, which is currently backed-up to disk using an online backup solution, said Todd. "Office and Excel files and the like are backed up on a scheduled basis, but we'd like to see them replicated in real-time."
Meanwhile, core transaction data are backed up in real-time to an alternative server as part of a service provided by the core vendor, he explained.
