FNTS provides IT services but faced challenges with an outdated infrastructure limiting their capabilities. They implemented a new infrastructure with EMC storage, VMware virtualization, and Cisco servers. This improved performance by 66%, eliminated downtime for migrations, and achieved two-hour disaster recovery. As a result, FNTS won back clients and accelerated business growth with their enhanced capabilities.

1. FIRST NATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
SOLUTIONS
Service provider expands target market with
enhanced cloud infrastructure
OVERVIEW
First National Technology Solutions provides advanced hosted and remote managed
IT services to customers nationwide. FNTS is a subsidiary of First National of
Nebraska, the largest privately owned banking company in the United States with
$17 billion in managed assets and nearly 5,000 employee associates.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
FNTS had built a solid business based on its deep IT services skill sets, top client
service, and advanced technologies. Yet the firm’s data center infrastructure was
ESSENTIALS
Industry
becoming outdated.
Tim Stephenson, Senior Sales Engineer, FNTS, recalls “We were starting to lose bids
to some major companies that didn’t feel our technology suite was going to meet
IT Services
their performance and reliability needs long term. It was time for a major
Company Size
transformation."
75 employees
"We looked at various vendors and determined that the combination of EMC,
Business Challenge
VMware, and Cisco provided us with the best performance, data protection, and
scalability,” he continues.
SOLUTIONS
Clients demanding more advanced
To help improve client satisfaction and enable business growth, FNTS chose a best-
capabilities
•
Outdated data center
infrastructure
•
in-class cloud infrastructure based on EMC storage, VMware® vSphere™
Need to reduce downtime
virtualization, Cisco UCS servers, and Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches. FNTS
associated with migrating
leverages this infrastructure to provide clients with an array of hosted and remote
workload between arrays
•
managed IT services, such as disaster recovery, application services, and storage,
Solutions
among other offerings.
In each of the firm's data centers, EMC® Symmetrix® VMAX® 10K enterprise storage
•
EMC Symmetrix VMAX 10K
•
EMC VPLEX Local
•
EMC VNX
•
EMC RecoverPoint
enable centralized management and sharing of resources across the EMC arrays.
•
VMware vSphere
To increase efficiency and agility, FNTS has virtualized 90 percent of its
•
Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM
infrastructure with vSphere. The firm’s cloud supports a diverse set of server and
DB2
mainframe environments, including Windows, Linux, IBM System z9, IBM AIX, IBM
supports FNTS' clients’ most critical applications and databases such as Oracle and
Microsoft SQL Server, while EMC VNX® unified storage runs general-purpose
applications. EMC VPLEX® Local virtual storage also resides in both data centers to
iSeries, and IBM pSeries.
For disaster recovery, FNTS uses EMC RecoverPoint remote data protection to
enable storage replication between its primary data center in Omaha and remote
site located more than 400 miles away in Chicago.
CUSTOMER PROFILE

2. Results
•
Improved performance by 66
percent
•
Reduced platform migration
outages from several hours
to zero
•
Achieved two-hour disaster
recovery
•
Accelerated business growth
SERVING CLIENTS WITH PREMIER PERFORMANCE
With VMAX 10K enterprise storage, FNTS meets its clients’ most demanding
performance requirements.
John Bowling, Storage Architect, FNTS, explains, “VMAX 10K is our premier storage
platform. If our clients need ultimate reliability and ultimate performance, we put
their applications on the VMAX 10K.”
By leveraging Symmetrix FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools),
the VMAX automatically optimizes performance in a tiered environment while reducing
costs and administrative time. After implementing the VMAX 10K, FNTS noticed
significant performance gains, including batch cycles that dropped from one hour to
20 minutes—a 66 percent improvement.
“VMAX 10K is our premier storage platform. If our
clients need ultimate reliability and ultimate
performance, we put their applications on the VMAX
10K.”
John Bowling
Storage Architect at First National Technogy Solutions
“VMAX 10K and FAST VP provide tremendous performance,” says Bowling. “Some of
our customers do very rigorous performance testing that causes insane levels of I/O.
With our prior systems, we never could have sustained these loads without causing
performance issues for everyone else on the system. In fact, we haven’t had a
performance issue since we moved our clients over to EMC two years ago.”
NON-DISRUPTIVE MIGRATIONS ENHANCE CLIENT
SATISFACTION
As an IT services provider, FNTS is constantly migrating clients to new storage
environments as their requirements evolve. EMC VPLEX virtual storage has greatly
eased these transitions.
“Most of our clients cannot have any downtime,” Bowling explains. “VPLEX lets us
move workloads around without our clients knowing about it. Before, we had to
coordinate any outage with our clients any time we needed to move them to a new
platform. Now, it just happens all behind the scenes, which makes our clients happier
and consumes less of our administrative time.”
Before VPLEX, outages caused by planned migrations ranged from 2 to 12 hours.
Now, FNTS manages the migrations in the background while systems are running
without any downtime.
Bowling says, “We’re considering VPLEX to help us manage migrations across data
centers without disruption as well.”
SOLVING CRITICAL DATA PROTECTION CHALLENGES
With EMC RecoverPoint, FNTS can recover clients’ infrastructure locally or remotely
from any point in time. This capability has proven valuable for disaster recovery,
testing, and data migrations.

3. Bowling says, “Stepping back to a specific point in time for recovery with
RecoverPoint is a huge benefit since the recovery is much more granular and
targeted. We also love that we can test and validate our client environments without
having to suspend disaster recovery. That’s a real differentiator for RecoverPoint.”
In addition, FNTS is using RecoverPoint to enable large data migrations—sometimes
involving several terabytes of data—across data centers.
RecoverPoint also solved a data protection challenge for a client that wasn’t able to
achieve disaster recovery.
“We have a large energy client that couldn’t get a disaster recovery test to run
successfully after years of trying,” explains Stephenson. “Once we put in
RecoverPoint, they recovered all of their systems in two hours and they were fully
operational in four hours. And it was very easy to accomplish because RecoverPoint
makes disaster recovery so easy to manage.”
TRANSFORMING FOR GROWTH
Not only has satisfaction among FNTS clients improved as a result of the advanced
EMC capabilities, but FNTS has encountered significant new business opportunities
that are helping drive growth.
“Transforming our infrastructure with EMC has been an eye opening experience for
some people in our company,” Stephenson comments. “They were surprised that
these new technologies would open doors with companies we could have never
touched before.
“In fact, we’ve won back some of the prospective clients we had lost in the past. Our
new capabilities enabled by EMC are getting a lot of attention and helping us grow our
business.”
CONTACT US
To learn more about how EMC
products, services, and solutions
can help solve your business and IT
challenges, contact your local
representative or authorized
reseller—or visit us at
www.EMC.com.
EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, Symmetrix, VMAX, VNX, and VPLEX are registered trademarks or
trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware and vSphere are
registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc., in the United States and other jurisdictions.
© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 10/12 Customer
Profile H10998
www.EMC.com
EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The
information is subject to change without notice.