Case Study: Financial Industry

Fiserv (NASDAQ: FISV) provides information management systems and services to the financial industry, including transaction processing, business process outsourcing and software and systems solutions. The company serves more than 15,000 clients worldwide, including banks and insurance companies.

Reliable data backup and disaster recovery protection is at the core of the Fiserv's ability to function effectively. Disaster recovery is an especially important matter in the financial industry where operations often span geographical locations, have a variety of different software installations, and are subject to system vulnerabilities. Fiserv faces an array of issues, from ensuring security measures are met, to backup and recovery assurance. The company needed a way to protect their data and ensure 100% backup and recovery success.

For several years Fiserv used basic scripts to monitor its servers. However, this was increasing the cost of managing information technology. In addition, the scripts were not providing the visibility and level of detail required to ensure that data protection services were meeting business objectives.

In 2003, the company made the decision to purchase Servergraph technology to provide notifications, capacity planning, and identify trending issues inside hundreds of servers backed up by IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). "The Servergraph dashboard provides the ability to see everything across the network in one view, and provides invaluable reporting on our total backup environment. I love this software" says Joy Harrison, Senior System Administrator with Fiserv ISS. "The speed in which Servergraph provides a visual display of statistics on our entire environment including the backup application, servers, libraries, media, and network connectivity is outstanding" cites Harrison.

To illustrate backup success, Fiserv was experiencing a persistent and chronic problem with the speed of a tape drive, something the company believed might have been at the server level. Before discovering Servergraph, Fiserv tried to resolve the issue by adding additional drives to their SCSI robotic tape libraries, costing the company time and money, and yet the problem was still unresolved. Using the drill-down capabilities within the Servergraph product suite, the company was able to gain visibility into the tape library, identify and isolate the matter to the tape drive itself, and quickly get resolution. Problems like these are quick and easy to address with Servergraph. Servergraph provides a real-time pulse around the entire backup environment, helping to identify, troubleshoot and resolve issues.

Using Servergraph, Joy Harrison is now able to create effective backup schedules that do not slow down the network. Harrison explains: "by implementing Servergraph, we were able to easily adjust the network cards and reduce the backup size by 1000%, something that would have been very difficult to achieve without Servergraph. Performance improvement and resource utilization are key components to successful system administration, and Servergraph enabled us to see results immediately".

Improved Backup Performance. Backups that used to take several hours are now reduced to just minutes

Efficient Resource Utilization. Servergraph saves at least 30+ hours per week of backup time, resulting in lower cost media, administration, and reduction of network latency.

Productivity. Using Servergraph, data no longer needs to be parsed, placed into complex spreadsheets, and communicated in-depth with other members of Fiserv. All the information is easily available at the launch of a browser with Servergraph in a high-level report that management can quickly and easily review.

Cost Savings. Servergraph has been able to save even two backup administrators 18 hours each, or 36 hours total – one full time equivalent (FTE).