What can a financial institution do if it’s running out of storage capacity? Brannen Banks, a bank holding company for seven banks in Florida, has found Windows-based disk partitioning software to be a solution that’s highly effective as well as economical.

With increasing numbers of computers to support, and more and more files on hand, companies in every industry are fending off a storage crunch. But banks and other financial firms can be particularly prone to the capacity pinch, due to factors ranging from mergers and acquisitions to regulatory pressures around document storage.

At Brannen Banks, for example, a manager in the central data center saw an immediate need to increase the storage capacity of the disk drives that support its 18 Windows servers.

The holding company uses the Windows 2003 servers to run virtually all of the banks’ applications, except for a legacy core banking application which still operates on IBM’s midrange servers, says Frank Gordon, Brannen’s network manager.

Specifically, the Windows servers run software for Brannen’s Internet banking services and information line for banking customers, in addition to supporting bank branches through Windows terminal services and remote thin client applications.

“Long ago, we’d bought hard drives of a certain size,” Gordon observes. “We partitioned them so that the Windows OS (operating system) was on the C drive, and the data on the D drive. But they were getting full.”

Gordon gave some thought to buying new hardware servers. But he readily determined that keeping the existing PC servers, while moving to larger and faster drives, would cost his company considerably less.

The tougher question rested on which software product to deploy for disk partitioning and data migration. Before adopting the Windows 2003 OS a few years ago, Brannen had run most of its data center software on Novell’s NetWare OS.

“But our banks were starting to add application functionality that couldn’t be supported in NetWare’s file and print environment,” he recalls.

Also at that time, Novell was beginning to place most of its emphasis on Linux, as opposed to NetWare, Gordon observed. “But we wanted an OS where we already had familiarity, so we chose Windows,” he adds.

But Gordon did have some fond memories from those earlier days of running Partition Magic on NetWare. He set out to do thorough online research to find a Windows-based product with similar capabilities.

“I discovered that there are many disk partitioning products, but that very few of them are for servers. Among those that do run on servers, most – except for Paragon Software’s Partition Manager Enterprise Server – are way too expensive. These high-end products do provide some capabilities that aren’t included in Paragon’s software, but much of that functionality would’ve been overkill for us,” he says.

According to Jeffrey W. Hyman, president of Paragon’s US Division, Paragon’s customers range all the way up to large enterprises. “But companies in the middle tier, such as Brannen, constitute our real sweet spot,” he elaborates.

Brannen also faced one special requirement, which was met by Partition Manager, but not by many other products. “I was surprised that few of them support all levels of RAID – and we do have some RAID 0 and RAID 5,” Gordon explains.

After completing his own online research, Gordon asked the bank’s VAR (value-added reseller) for a recommendation. The VAR also advised Gordon to go with Paragon’s product.

In the interests of further cost conservation, Gordon purchased Paragon’s technicians’ license, in which the software is licensed directly to the technician. Under this particular scheme, although the software can be installed on multiple systems, it can’t be installed on more than one system at any given time, said Hyman, during an interview at the Showstoppers press event in New York City this fall.

After buying the technicians’ license, Gordon was delighted that, with the help of only one systems analyst, he was able to migrate the data to the new drives – and partition the drives – in just two days. In contrast, Gordon estimated a timeframe of several months for pursuing an alternative approach of reformatting the drives and reinstalling all software.

Paragon is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Most of the company’s partitioning and backup products, including Partition Manager Enterprise Server, are available exclusively for Windows, according to Hyman.

On the whole, Gordon couldn’t be any happier with his own choice of Paragon’s Windows-based software for disk partitioning and data migration.

“I don’t even have any suggestions for improvement. It worked absolutely flawlessly,” Gordon says.

www.brannenbanks.com

www.paragon-software.com

By Jacqueline Emigh