Utility storage: Right on the money

MB Financial Bank, one of the largest independent banks in the Chicago area, proclaims it makes banking "betsimpsier": better, simpler, easier. Among the reasons the bank can make such a claim is its use of utility storage, a New Data Center technology.

MB Financial Bank sprang into being in 2001 when two of Chicago's oldest community banks - Manufacturers Bank and MidCity Financial - merged. With this granddaddy of mergers came a financial institution double the size of the old. Problem was, each of the 35 then-operating branches housed its own customer data: That made running a cohesive business a challenge.

Karen Perlman, MB Financial Bank's director of marketing, recounts the difficulties of gathering customer data at that time. "We had to have programs that pulled data from 35 locations. The data was hard to get at, and we couldn't get it with any frequency," she says.

More importantly, the bank was concerned that having data stored throughout the branches might hinder growth, Perlman says.

To fix business issues such as these, the IT group consolidated and centralized its storage operations in a new data center in the Chicago area. The company didn't want to build any old storage-area network (SAN). Instead, with the goal of maximizing flexibility and scalability, it turned to SAN technology to let applications grab storage capacity as they needed it from a common pool within an array, utility-style.

After evaluating technology from EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Xiotech and start-up 3Par, MB Financial Bank settled on 3Par's InServ Storage Server. This tiered-storage array, topped with specialized provisioning software, gives the bank the flexibility and scalability it wants, plus makes storage management and backup easy, says Andy Kukuk, SAN engineer for the bank.

In 2004 the bank had one InServ Storage Server operating at the new data center and had moved a small portion of business data to it. Kukuk's job was to move the rest of the legacy data onto the SAN and to use the 3Par technology to its fullest, he says.

Over six months, Kukuk migrated the remaining application data from the bank branches to the central storage network. Today the InServ array supports about 20 Microsoft database, messaging, file/print, system management and clustering servers, which now support 40 branches. On the SAN, storage capacity has reached 20TB, he says. Data resides in one of two tiers. Frequently accessed business data resides on 147GB drives in the InServ array, while less frequently accessed data is stored on less expensive 300GB drives, he explains. Those drives, he adds, are mainly for file server data.

3Par's Thin Provisioning software lets MB Financial Bank provide storage in utility fashion. Using Thin Provisioning, which works with 3Par's dedicate-on-write capabilities, Kukuk allocates logical capacity to applications based on perceived need. If an application ultimately requires more capacity for its written data, it draws resources as needed from a common pool.