Penson Financial Services, Inc. – Case Study

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Permabit Becomes the Archive Storage Tier for Penson

Penson Financial Services, Inc. (PFSI), based in Dallas, Texas, is a leading securities services firm that provides flexible, technology–based processing solutions for the execution, clearing, custody and settlement of securities transactions. As a highly regulated company, they faced significant challenges in maintaining and making readily available the growing volumes of data it must retain over long periods of time. Its previous reliance on storing data on removable media was no longer viable from either a cost or usability perspective. Penson turned to Permabit Enterprise Archive™ for its long–term, cost effective, secure, highly available data retention solution.

The Challenge

Long–term data retention is a critical issue for Penson. Federal regulations, including SEC 17a–4, require WORM retention for all relevant material, mainly affecting email communications and associated attachments. Initially, due to the high cost of disk drives, Penson archived data to DVD and Optical WORM media, but the process became problematic when the number of DVDs and optical platters exceeded the capacity of the jukeboxes.

Email data was archived to DVD, which totaled over 700 units by early 2008. This number was on the rise as more data was generated by Penson’s growing staff. Internal and external reports were archived to the optical media and resulted in over 650 platters being managed.

Regulatory requirements and litigation support were pushing to have information readily discoverable in shorter time frames, which was not possible with the high level of manual intervention needed to load and unload DVDs and optical platters to conduct these searches. IT regularly faced discovery requests that forced them to pull data from multiple devices — and given the technical and complex nature of this process, the task required senior IT staff.

In addition, approximately every three years, the jukeboxes would have to be forklifted out because of newer drive technologies, which was an expensive and time–consuming process. Penson’s existing storage environment was neither scalable, cost–effective, nor labor–efficient.

Permabit Delivers an Archive Storage Tier

Selection and Deployment:

Matt Pittman, VP IT/MIS led the search for a new archive solution, quickly narrowing the field to three vendors: EMC Centera, NetApp, and Permabit. The Permabit Enterprise Archive Data Center Series™ was selected as the best solution to meet Penson’s current and future compliance storage needs.

Pittman credits Permabit’s open architecture and advanced functionality for putting it ahead of both EMC and NetApp, and the only solution that met his selection criteria by offering a comprehensive solution that was:

• Online Disk–based Storage — for fast, seamless access to all data

• Cost Effective — delivers a fast ROI, and reduces overall storage–related costs

• Simple — easy to deploy, use and administer

• Scalable — allows for seamless expansion and storage upgrades

• Compliance — with built–in WORM capabilities

• Flexible — simple to adopt for other Penson archive projects

• Reliable — with built–in replication to remote sites for disaster recovery purposes

Deployment went smoothly, with 700 DVDs of data migrated to the Permabit archive in less than two weeks. Immediately, the historic data that took senior IT staff days to weeks to access was now readily available to users across Penson.

Penson also takes full advantage of Permabit’s built–in replication functionality, hosting a second Permabit system at a remote location. Fast and efficient, this replicated system is a primary part of the disaster recovery protection for Penson’s compliance purposes.

All data is available in a read–only form at the DR site, and with a single mouse–click, data can be promoted to being live.

Permabit Delivers Meaningful Results

The replacement of all removable storage devices with a Permabit disk–based archive had delivered immediate and significant benefits to Penson, described in the table below:

Future Plans

Taking full advantage of Permabit’s flexible and scalable architecture, Penson is looking to use the archive to support other enterprise archive projects. Currently, Penson is looking to use Permabit for the back end of two very large projects requiring the storage of high volumes of compliance–related data. Pittman sees the Permabit Enterprise Archive™ as perfectly suited to these expansion projects: “Later this year, we expect to use Permabit as the back end for two extensive new systems. Connecting each of these departments to the existing Permabit Enterprise Archive™ will be as simple as carving out a space for them. It couldn’t be any easier.”

In Summary

Permabit Enterprise Archive™ is now a critical part of Penson’s overall storage and data retention strategy, forming the archive storage tier. Selected for its advanced functionality, simplicity, scalability, and ability to deliver cost and staff time savings, Penson now enjoys the following benefits from the Permabit system:

• Secure, compliant retention of data for compliance purposes

• Seamless, self–service access to all archived data, speeding discovery processes

• Flexible and easily expandable to accommodate other Penson groups

• Reduced IT and staff costs

• Fast ROI

Find out More

Find out how Permabit Enterprise Archive™ can help your company better manage your long–term data retention while saving IT storage costs. Contact us today at info@permabit.com or by calling 617-252-9600.

Permabit Dramatically Reduced Both Time and Costs of Discovery Processes
Before	With Permabit
IT received an average of 25 discovery requests each month, which took full–time senior staff away from other IT tasks. A single complex discovery project could take days to weeks to fulfill, as the search could cross over hundreds of DVDs, each of which had to be manually loaded.	With all data now accessible on the Permabit archive, even the most exhaustive searches can be done within hours, and without IT support.
“When a regulatory agency asked for historic documents and email, senior IT staff would disappear for days or even weeks to handle the request. What took weeks now takes minutes with Permabit. The retrieval time has been unbelievable!” explains Pittman.
Permabit Delivered Fast ROI
Before	With Permabit
The costs of the legacy removable media system were high and rising, encompassing IT staff time to handle DVDs for searches, the costs of the DVDs, and very expensive forklift upgrades. In addition, the media was shipped to Iron Mountain for disaster recovery protection, adding over $20,000 annually.	Expensive IT staff resources are now focused on critical IT projects, saving considerable staff costs. Permabit has eliminated the costs of the removable media, and additional savings will soon be realized as Penson replaces off–site storage at Iron Mountain with Permabit’s already functioning automatic replication to an off–site location.
“We achieved a 100% ROI in months. And, Permabit has let us exceed people’s expectations of delivering data in a timely manner,” states Pittman.
Permabit Provides Easy Implementation and Minimal On–going Maintenance
Before	With Permabit
Maintaining the growing system of removable media was extremely time–consuming and costly. Upgrading the jukeboxes was labor–intensive and expensive due to newer drive technologies that had to be adopted. Replicating the data for disaster recovery purposes was also a manual, time–consuming process.	Installing the Permabit archive was a simple, fast process, taking less than a day. Maintaining the system takes little administrative time for the IT staff. Migrating the data off of all 700 DVDs into the Permabit archive took less than two weeks. Permabit’s automated replication functionality saves staff time for manual replication of the removable media and increased security of critical compliance data.
“Ease of use was critical in the selection process. Permabit was up and running very quickly, literally taking longer to rack the system than to implement it. As we move users to self–service access, we are only now involved in maintenance, which takes very little time,” states Pittman.

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Company Snapshot

• Global Financial Services company

• Headquarters: Dallas, Texas

• Majority of business conducted over the Internet

Storage Environment

• SAN — Primary Tier

• NAS — Secondary Tier

• Permabit — Archive Tier

Permabit Deployment

• Permabit Enterprise Archive™ — Data Center Series

• Replication to Remote Sites

• WORM

• Scalable Data Reduction

Key Results:

• Dramatically reduced time involved for discovery searches, while reducing IT involvement

• Increased security of all compliance data

• Decreased IT costs and achieved full ROI in months