A provider of critical document management fulfillment and regulatory compliance services to the legal and financial industry, including mortgage lenders, the Walz Group works under stringent compliance requirements including Dodd-Frank provisions for forclosures, and TARP and other regulations governing mortgage and foreclosure information, the larger financial industry, and large legal firms. These apply both to live data and to backup copies. Walz also needs an effective backup and DR to ensure fast and, even more important, complete recovery of critical client documents in the event of a disaster.

In 2009 Waltz’s problem was that a fragmented, aging infrastructure was making business growth almost impossible, Bart Falzarano, Walz Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) told Wikibon’s David Vellante in an interview at VMworld 2012. Walz’s environment was typical of many IT shops – a collection of aging switches and servers from multiple vendors. It was using NAS storage attached to those servers and daisy chaining NAS units together as data volumes grew.

This created major issues with scaling to support business growth and particularly for data backup and recovery and the maintenance of the high levels of data security. Although the vendor had assured Walz that it could daisy-chain up to seven units, in practice it found that chaining more than four created performance problems. The resulting systems were not reliable, and replication between tiers was difficult. “Sometimes we found we could write the data to NAS, but trying to pull it off after we daisy-chained some of the arrays together was extremely difficult. We would scale out and then found we needed a new NAS solution, and these didn’t work well together. We were doing host-based replication, and above a certain number of T-bytes we found that had problems.”

The situation was so bad that Walz decided it needed a forklift upgrade of most of the data center. After investigating the options, it chose FlexPod, the data-center-in-a-box system from Cisco, VMware, and NetApp. “We did due diligence with other technology manufacturers as well, and the found an outpouring of support from Cisco, NetApp, and VMware to help us with our business challenge and create a technology solution that would move our business forward.”

A Dramatic Change

The change, Falzarano said, was dramatic. “We set up the equipment, leveraging Cisco UCS Quickstart with NetApp, in four days! It was brand new technology, brought in, stood up, provisioned, and we were doing redundancy testing on the fourth day.”

The new system increased virtualization efficiency from 4:1 to greater than 15:1, reduced port density, and reduced rack space requirements by more than 50%. Most of all, the change to FlexPod decreased staffing requirements tremendously. With the old environment, Walz needed a ratio of one IT engineer to support every 15 systems. FlexPod changed that ratio to one IT engineer to manage more than 50 systems.

FlexPod and vMotion allows Walz to move virtual applications between physical resource pools in milliseconds. It provides a service profile template that allows it to move unvirtualized applications between resource pools in a few minutes. “That’s very efficient management,” Falzarano said. “The team is managing those templates in a production catalog that includes development of lower tier environments as well.”

This also makes securing the environment much simpler. “Information security is not an at-rest program,” Falzarano said. “It’s always changing. Information security, compliance, and governance go hand-in-hand. Every day we can read about a new data breach in some company. Then in the regulatory arena we have OCC consent decrees, and the Department of Justice is looking at F100 company security practices and extending those federal guidelines to banks and third-party service providers. So we have to remain flexible and ready to respond to the next security challenge. FlexPod gives us that flexibility.”