Maximizing Efficiency Enables Future Growth and Drives Competitive Edge

Let me tell you a story of heroes, adventure, and knights in shining armor that help save the day. Well, OK. Not exactly like that.

This is a story about an ambitious team of IT engineers, and how they not only set their company up for dramatic growth and efficiency, but also how—in less than three years—they anticipate achieving an up to 166% return on investment from rebuilding an entire data center infrastructure.

DCI (Data Center Inc.) provides full-service bank technology and processing solutions to financial institutions nationwide. After nearly half a century, DCI is quite familiar with the challenges of keeping up in a competitive and continually changing industry. Years of rapid growth had increased the company’s IT footprint to four large, regional data centers. Effectively managing data for nearly 200 banks while controlling costs has always been an operational challenge. DCI realized its current model wasn’t sustainable given its rapid growth and future development plans. The IT team set a goal for itself to improve efficiency, consolidate resources to improve utilization and reduce IT footprint, and to lower costs.

The nature of DCI’s business, and its clients’ customers’ need to access their money 24x7x365, means that DCI banking customers demand reliable, around-the-clock processing services and comprehensive information protection. DCI is also an aggressive leader in developing new banking technologies. When DCI embarked on a mission to both improve its IT environment and redesign its iCore360® processing software, it knew it needed to find the right IT infrastructure. This architecture needed to easily accommodate DCI’s ambitious growth plans and software development initiatives, while simultaneously maintaining service levels, improving efficiency and driving down costs.

DCI talked to many companies before embarking on its adventure. But one company stood apart from the crowd for its approach as counselor and collaborator at the round table, rather than dictatorial overlord: NetApp.

Once it decided to consolidate and virtualize its IT environment using NetApp®, DCI turned to ISG Technology, Inc., a member of NetApp’s open solution partner ecosystem, to quickly implement the solution. DCI transformed its IT infrastructure in record time without interruption in services, and ahead of expectations. And DCI started realizing savings on day one. According to Robert Ross, chief security officer and senior vice president of Network and Technical Services at DCI, savings in capital expenditures, operational costs, and improved business efficiencies are projected to provide a massive return on investment on “this infrastructure that delivers significantly greater scalability and functionality than our previous environment.

“We wanted to improve system utilization. NetApp technologies allowed us to consolidate systems to more efficiently use IT resources, and only required a fraction of the space that we thought we would need,” continues Ross.

So, with DCI’s smart decision making and help from key solution partners such as NetApp, Cisco, and VMware, DCI was able to transform its data center to:

• Reclaim 75% of its data center space
• Store 80% more data at half the cost
• Save over $30,000 in new capital expenditures—in one year alone
• Reduce energy costs by 70%: saving up to $125,000 in power and cooling costs each year
• Enable within-minutes, automated disaster recovery at half the cost
• Handle growth of 100TB+ of storage with just one full-time employee
• Support more bank customers on fewer systems
• Enhance overall system performance

DCI is pleased with the competitive edge it gets from the new NetApp environment.

“NetApp not only saved us time and money, it also helped us gain a competitive edge by enabling us to do things now that many consider next-generation,” says Ross. “We can, today, easily customize exactly the storage and cloud infrastructure our customers need. And our expanded state of readiness provides additional peace of mind for our customers. Many of our competitors are attempting similar changes in pieces. But DCI is way ahead with fully virtualized and enabled cloud services across our entire IT environment.”

According to Ross, DCI can now:

• Build a complete new IT environment from the ground up in about 15 minutes
• More easily shift workloads and manage the environment without disruption to users
• Get new services to market much quicker
• Increase data protection and decrease business recovery time by 50% or more

And, access and response times for its Oracle® and SQL Server® database environments are better than ever. When DCI clients are visited by federal regulators, the banks often can simply refer them to DCI as an example of compliance. It’s that easy.

All of this, Ross says, further enhances his customers’ satisfaction.

Even better, DCI is confident that its IT infrastructure is fully prepared for its ground-breaking iCore360 software which offers banks a full menu of private cloud-based core processing and bank management services that are far ahead of the competition.

DCI projects that it will implement its new software for significantly less money than it would have cost without the new IT environment. DCI also anticipates equally impressive time to market acceleration. Between spring and fall of this year, DCI will migrate all of its nearly 200 banks to the new core processing platform without interruption. That’s an aggressive timeline, but DCI is confident: it uses an innovative approach to model environments in just seconds at near-zero storage costs based on NetApp cloning innovations.

“We believe we’ve got a competitive edge in the deployment of our iCore360 banking solution. It is a completely redesigned .NET architecture, as opposed to a false front-end on old technology used by our competitors. And the virtual machine and NetApp environment greatly accelerated our ability to develop, test and deploy iCore360 on our truncated schedule, and do it more efficiently,” says Ross.

You might think this all sounds like a fantasy. But companies like DCI are proving the value of trusted advisors and improving IT efficiency every day.

Just ask DCI, which calculates it will achieve up to 166% ROI in three years on its data center transformation. DCI is also enabling major business breakthrough by getting new solutions to market faster than the competition. Saving money, gaining a competitive edge, and fortifying its IT infrastructure for the future: that’s efficiency, NetApp style.

To get the nuts-and-bolts details about DCI’s remarkable accomplishments, check out its success story. If you’re interested in exploring how you might accomplish similar extraordinary feats, contact your local NetApp representative or one of our many qualified partners.