Case Study: GTE Federal Credit Union achieves 20-minute RPO and 78% bandwidth reduction with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Credit Union Meets Federal Disaster Recovery Requirements with Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

GTE Federal Credit Union, a member-owned financial institution with $1.8 billion in assets, was struggling to replicate growing volumes of EMC and NetApp data between its primary data center and DR site. Replication stalled during peak periods as the EMC cache filled and the fiber OC3/SONET link was maxed out, putting the credit union at risk of missing the NCUA-mandated 20-minute RPO and requiring costly storage or network overhauls.

GTE deployed Riverbed Steelhead 6050 appliances (RiOS) at both sites to optimize WAN replication with deduplication, compression and protocol optimization. The appliances delivered an average 78% data reduction, kept EMC cache utilization under 35%, enabled compliance with the 20-minute RPO, avoided expensive storage and bandwidth upgrades, delivered immediate payback, eliminated SRDF/A failures, and provided richer reporting and greater DR flexibility.

GTE Federal Credit Union

Vladimir Zamkovoy

UNIX Architect