Mortgage Banker Gateway Funding With EVault From i365

Seagate Technology PLC announced that mortgage banker Gateway Funding Diversified Mortgage Services, L.P. has implemented the Plug-n-Protect backup and recovery appliance EVault from i365, a Seagate Company, together with EVault Replication to provide reliable data protection capabilities.

Gateway Funding called upon trusted i365 partner Contour Data Solutions, provider of strategic IT solutions and data management, to help the mortgage banker identify a backup and recovery solution that would help them save time and money protecting the company’s rapidly expanding virtualized IT infrastructure.

Gateway Funding recently made a switch to a virtualized IT environment based upon VMware, which introduced new demands that were incompatible with its outdated tape-based data protection solutions. The growing company is managing far more data than they had in the past, which threatened to increase costs, complicate storage requirements, and drain already limited IT personnel resources. The company enlisted Contour Data Solutions to identify the best backup and recovery solution for their new environment. Contour recommended i365’s EVault data protection technology because it presented a more streamlined, efficient, and cost-effective backup and recovery process.

"We’ve been able to significantly reduce our recovery times. In the past most of our time was spent making sure our tapes were working properly and shuttling tapes back and forth from storage when recovery was needed," said Dan Catinella, vice president of Information Technology at Gateway Funding, who speaks highly of the EVault solution’s return on investment. "Everything is automated now and we don’t waste any time troubleshooting remote office backup issues or digging through old backup data. All these time savings add up, and over a two to three-year period we expect the solution to pay for itself. It’s freed up our team so much that we are able to spend more time concentrating on our business and strategic initiatives."

The company implemented two EVault Plug-n-Protect appliances along with EVault Replication to automate data backup of virtualized servers. One EVault Plug-n-Protect appliance is used as the active backup vault at Gateway Funding’s corporate office in Horsham, PA, and it is configured to replicate backup data offsite to the second EVault Plug-n-Protect appliance, which is a passive vault at their disaster recovery site in Reading, PA. This implementation provides efficient and secure offsite replication of the primary vault so that the passive vault assumes backup and restore functionality should the active one fail. This implementation has significantly reduced Gateway Funding’s recovery time of a server from more than four hours down to just 20 minutes.

"Legacy backup systems are often cumbersome, and the labor and media resources needed for these outdated tape processes really add up," said George Hoenig, vice president, product operations, i365. "Automated disk-based backups, efficient and secure offsite replication, and simplified data recoveries allow companies such as Gateway to meet demanding availability requirements and to stay nimble by easing the burden on IT departments so they can spend their time on other projects that are more central to a company’s growth."