Resource Center

Expansion fueled by acquisitions as well as organic growth drove Donegal Insurance Group to modernize its data center. The effort, which was well along by early 2009, included server virtualization and an enterprise-class storage area network. Mike Clement, Donegal's assistant VP for information services, says the SAN helped ensure business continuity by replicating data between the Marietta, Pa.-based insurer's main data center at its headquarters and its distant disaster recovery (DR) site in Le Mars, Iowa, but bandwidth was becoming scarce. 

Fidelity Bank (Fidelity) is an independent, privately owned business bank located in Minnesota. The bank, founded in 1970, has more than 900 customers in the Twin Cities area with over $350 million in assets.

Finisar is at the forefront of this wave, providing optical components and testing equipment that enable high-speed communications across Ethernet local area networks (LANs), Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs), and metropolitan area networks (MANs). 

Hitting the speed of light might be impossible, but don’t tell that to The Community Bank in Massachusetts. The local lending institution improved its EqualLogic replication times by 2,400 percent, dropping from a week-and-a-half to a matter of hours, all without purchasing additional bandwidth. 

For Denali Alaskan Federal Credit Union (Denali) to expand its online banking services, enhancing its business continuity plan was a given. However, Denali’s wide area network (WAN) was insufficient for moving large amounts of data between the company’s main site in Anchorage and DR facility in Fairbanks. It was taking over eleven hours to replicate more than fifty gigabytes (GB) of data over the WAN — far too long for Denali’s IT team. Adding a new online banking system with up to ten times the data of the existing system would be impossible.