Bank Uses EMC

HOPKINTON, Mass. -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC - News), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that Central Bank, a holding company that operates 13 banks throughout Missouri, has deployed EMC storage, software, and services to lower the costs of managing fast-growing information assets, while improving protection of checks, bank statements, financial records and other information.

Bob Boeckman, Senior Vice President and Manager of the Information Systems Group, Central Technology Services -- the IT organization for Central Bank, said, "Over the past 18 months business growth and data retention regulations have quadrupled our information assets and the cost in time and resources to reconfigure servers, add disk drives, and manage server outages was becoming prohibitive. EMC was critical to retaking control over our rapid-fire information growth. We not only are more efficiently managing and better protecting all of our data, but we've reduced time-to-market for new financial services products without increasing our administrative staff."

Based in Jefferson, Mo., Central Bank deployed 165 terabytes of EMC storage to support its information infrastructure and information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. EMC Symmetrix DMX-3(TM) network storage systems supports Central Bank's mission critical Microsoft SQL 2005 databases, Microsoft Exchange 2003 email and core banking applications. The company also uses EMC CLARiiON® CX network storage systems for its for check imaging processes, EMC Celerra® NS network-attached storage for backups via iSCSI and EMC Centera(TM) content-addressed storage for archiving check images.

"As information ages, we move it to the appropriate EMC storage tier to lower our operational costs and increase the value of our IT investments," said Boeckman. "As we refine our information lifecycle management strategy, we expect these gains to grow even more."

For example, check images are stored on EMC CLARiiON storage area networks (SANs) for 60 days and are then archived on an EMC Centera system, which stores up seven years of the bank's check images to satisfy banking regulations. The Centera also houses customer statements and financial reports dating back 35 years."We used to archive our check images onto a CD jukebox, and then port them over to tape," said Boeckman. "If we needed to produce checks going back two to three years for a customer engaged in a court case, it would take months to manually mount hundreds of tapes and print the checks. With EMC Centera, we can pull up a check online instantaneously and retrieve hundreds of checks spanning several years in just a few hours. We estimate we've saved $250,000 by replacing our CD jukeboxes and tape silos with online storage. And that doesn't even include the soft dollar costs related to the huge amount of time our research and IT department used to spend recovering checks."

To dramatically improve disaster recovery response time, Central Bank replaced its IBM Shark storage with more robust EMC Symmetrix DMX storage and used EMC SRDF/A(TM) software to mirror data to another location 400 miles away. Central Bank has also implemented additional EMC software solutions, such as Centera Replicator(TM) and EMC NetWorker®, to further shrink recovery time and backup windows in all tiers of its storage environment.

"The breadth and quality of EMC's business continuity solutions have made reliable information access a reality across our entire enterprise," said Boeckman. "If one of our data centers stopped operating, we could recover our applications stored on EMC in four hours compared to the two days it used to take. We're also using EMC NetWorker to automatically and centrally back up all of our SAN and NAS applications to tape, which has slashed our backup window from 20 hours to only 12. And that's with data encryption, something we weren't able to do before."

EMC Corp.