Case Study: MinnWest Bank achieves true disaster recovery with Riverbed SteelHead (protecting 8 TB/day, RPO ≤1 hour)

Riverbed Powers Disaster Recovery for Minnwest Bank

Minnwest Bank is a family-owned regional bank with over $1 billion in assets, 25 offices and thousands of retail and business customers. Facing the risk of losing hours of critical transaction data, Minnwest needed to replace slow, tape-based backups and a limited 5 Mbps WAN with a standardized disaster‑recovery approach that could handle heavy and spiking data churn (averaging 13 GB/hour and peaking near 200 GB/hour) in a VMware environment.

Minnwest deployed Dell EqualLogic replication, upgraded the WAN to a dedicated 30 Mbps DS‑3, and added Riverbed SteelHead 5050‑M appliances tuned for high throughput (SDR‑M, MX‑TCP and QoS). The solution now replicates all 8 TB of data daily, delivers an RPO of one hour or less (often ~15 minutes), greatly simplifies administration (about 10 minutes of daily checks) and provides true, turnkey disaster recovery.

MinnWest Bank

Jonathan Schiller

CEO, MinnWest Bank