The company moved first to protect 82 Wintel production servers by mirroring their mission-critical data out of state and encrypting any data shipped off-site.
The storage effort has also added the use of Internet SCSI protocols with CNL's Microsoft Exchange servers to increase mailbox sizes while cutting the cost and complexity of direct-attached storage.
The storage project was completed late last year.
The new architecture has increased Exchange uptime to 99.8 percent, reduced e-mail restores to 10 minutes or less, and reduced full backup and recovery times from two days to eight hours, said Joel Schwalbe, vice president of technical services at CNL Financial.
Schwalbe said the company decided to mirror data from Orlando to a hot site in Atlanta after reports that other financial services firms were unable to bring systems back up quickly after disasters.
In the past, he said, data was backed up on tape and then sent "off to a disaster recovery vendor, with the hope that they could rebuild our systems within 48 hours. We quickly learned the human factor that was involved wasn't something you could plan on."
The company began mirroring the data shortly after the storage upgrade effort began, when it installed a Network Appliance Inc. FAS940 array running NetApp's SnapMirror software. The new system can perform block-level backup of data across dedicated Fibre Channel networks and Ethernet-based LANs through the use of iSCSI.
By moving off of direct- attached storage and onto a storage-area network using iSCSI, Schwalbe said, CNL quadrupled the amount of storage space on 1,400 Exchange mailboxes to 500MB each.
The new storage architecture has also improved reliability, he said. Prior to installing the NetApp array, the firm had three separate Exchange file servers that couldn't run for a week without problems cropping up, Schwalbe said.
"We use a lot fewer resources to manage the backups and restores than we did before. CNL probably cut the equivalent of a [full-time worker]," Schwalbe said.
On the leading edge
CNL is now replicating about 12TB of data daily to Atlanta, where it's stored on a NetApp NearStore R200 array, a near-line storage system based on ATA disk drives.
An encryption device was added to the CNL storage architecture about two months ago with the installation of a DataFort appliance from Redwood City, Calif.-based Decru Inc. in its Orlando data center. The appliance sits between CNL's NetApp array and a new linear tape library from Overland Storage Inc., Schwalbe said.
Schwalbe said that a 5% to 10% performance drop in CNL backups after encryption was added to the process is offset by the technology's ability to keep CNL from becoming "the next Citigroup," referring to Citigroup Inc.'s loss last June of data tapes containing information from the accounts of about 3.9 million customers.
John Webster, a storage analyst at Data Mobility Group LLC in Londonderry, New Hampshire, said CNL's all-in-one storage architecture is leading-edge but is also quickly being adopted by financial services providers because it offers a relatively inexpensive, centralized and easily managed infrastructure.
Webster added that CNL's use of encryption technology for archive tapes is also leading-edge, though "financial services is starting to pick up on it," in part because of "all the different pieces of legislation around data loss."