Village Bank Chose AppAssure

AppAssure
Software, Inc. announced that Village Bank, a midsized community
bank which serves the Richmond metro area, switched to AppAssure’s Replay 4
backup and recovery software to overcome 50% failure rate with Symantec Backup
Exec‘s tape backup system.

With Replay’s disk imaging solution
the bank is stated to have reached disaster recovery planning ability.

"We’re a midsized bank which also owns a mortgage
company," explains Bob Thomas, Vice President of Information Technology at
Village Bank. "We have 18 locations around the Richmond area and a staff size of about 230
people. Our infrastructure includes mortgage loan origination applications,
Fiserve’s bank imaging system, and client account opening software platforms
all running on our SQL servers. Plus we’re a service bureau bank, which means
we work with Fiserve, who does the heavy lifting of core processing of accounts
payable, account management, and so on. So there’s a lot going on at any one
time. We were using Symantec Backup Exec 12 and our backup jobs were
continually failing, leading to questionable recovery scenarios."

As Thomas estimates, his three-person IT team had to deal
with unacceptable failure rates of up to 50% regularly.

"We would do a daily backup which ran three to six
hours a night, and then a full backup on Friday, plus a monthly," says
Thomas. "We don’t have a staff to come in on Saturday, so we’d get the backup
on Monday and about 50% of the time, find an error. There wasn’t much we could
do about it because we couldn’t afford to rerun the backup, so we’d just note
we had had a failure and hope we wouldn’t need to recover anything, because if
something failed, we’d be out two weeks of data. We thought about redoing the
backup schedule, and looked at another tape mechanism, but it was just too
expensive for us. We’d call Symantec on the failures, but they could only
recommend a patch or have us waiting for the next version."

According to Thomas, this nightmare scenario was made all
the worse by the fact that the bank had grown so much in the last couple of
years that it was expanding faster than Backup Exec’s solution could keep up
with it. "The failing backup jobs put the company at risk when a recovery
is required," says Thomas emphatically. "Since the number of tapes
and time required to do a full backup was increasing, we knew that we needed a
more secure and reliable process for the bank."

Thomas’s team came across AppAssure, and did a Replay trial.
Within 15 minutes, states Thomas, Village Bank’s servers were all up and
protected by Replay in a test mode. Thomas chose Replay.

"Our backups are running much quicker and the time to
recovery is cut from hours and days to just minutes," says Thomas.
"Not only that, but the ability to go into Exchange store and restore one
email with Replay has been eye opening".

As Thomas states, Village Bank now feels confident that its
data is protected as it looks to the future. "Replay has completely
changed our DR strategy because we have the time to focus on the future,"
says Thomas. "Village Bank can now meet its goal of doing replication off-site,
which is what is up next on IT team’s plate," adds Thomas.

"The bottom line," says Thomas, "is that
Replay lives up to the hype. I would encourage anyone who is looking for a good
backup and disaster recovery solution to take those words to heart. Replay does
what it says it does."