Los Angeles Federal Credit Union Improves Recovery Performance And Protects Rapidly Growing Data Sets

By InMage

Los Angeles Federal Credit Union (LAFCU) was founded in 1936 by Los Angeles City employees to provide a source for affordable financial services to their fellow workers. Today, LAFCU is a full-service financial institution with over 48,000 members, offering such products as checking, savings and investment accounts, loans and insurance services.

The Challenge: Improve Recovery Capabilities for Rapidly Growing Image Archives

LAFCU has six full service branches, nine access centers and over 3,000 shared branch locations at over 770 credit unions in the United States. Its main data center is located in Glendale, California with a second data center in Anaheim Hills for disaster recovery. LAFCU uses EMC Documentum as its content management platform for image retrieval and archiving. Every day, the data generated from fi nancial transactions, loans, new member applications and more is funneled into the image archival system and stored locally at the Glendale data center.

"As a credit union, we generate a large volume of sensitive data on a daily basis," said Brian Todd, information technology manager, LAFCU. "We maintain records and images of everything from loan documents to customer correspondence and transaction receipts. We were previously doing a nightly tape backup that would start at 8 p.m. and fi nish around 2 a.m. The tapes would remain on site overnight until they were sent to a secure, offsite storage vault in the morning."

"The tape backup process was defi nitely not ideal," continues Todd. "It took hours to complete, presented some safety concerns, and resulted in large tape libraries and 24-hour old backups. Since we had to replace our imaging hardware and software during an upgrade to a new version of Documentum, it was the ideal opportunity to discuss the weaknesses of our current backup and recovery processes. Continuing with tape backup was not a viable alternative. We needed to reduce the impact of backup operations on our growing volumes of data, while also moving to an approach that would minimize data loss on recovery, signifi cantly shorten recovery times, and serve as an affordable disaster recovery solution for our image archives."