Grow Financial Turns to Dell for Data Efficiency

[See Also: Financial Services Is Prominent in Dell's New NYC Solutions Center]

When Grow Financial Federal Credit Union (Tampa, Fla., $1.8 billion in assets) decided to modernize its IT infrastructure and virtualize its data centers, it partnered with computer technology firm Dell to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

"About a year and a half ago, we realized the need to bring on additional storage to allow us to get more flexible in our IT infrastructure," recalls James Stock, assistant vice president of Network Services for Grow Financial.

Stock says the credit union has a "longstanding relationship" with Round Rock, Texas-based Dell, and relied on its longtime partner to facilitate the upgrade.

Stock says Grow financial initially went with Dell's Compellent enterprise storage systems, which he says have helped make operations more efficient and saved "10 to 15 hours a month" through automation.

The credit union is also receiving a two-fold improvement in storage utilization through Compellent's thin provisioning, which enables the company to make the most of its storage resources without wasting them on pre-allocated and unused storage, providing a sharp contrast compared with its legacy storage arrays.

Grow Financial also utilizes Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell KACE Appliances, which Stock notes has enabled the company to provide better service to its members in a more efficient way while simultaneously managing risk.

Since migrating to Dell's storage solutions from its legacy technology, Grow has been able to reduce data storage maintenance costs by up to 50 percent while increasing storage performance by up to 30 percent.

"Dell's technology offers as much flexibility as we will possibly need over the coming years, enabling us to direct our attention to providing our members with the most cost effective products and services, rather than spending more time just managing IT resources," says Stock.

Bryan Yurcan is associate editor for Bank Systems and Technology. He has worked in various editorial capacities for newspapers and magazines for the past 8 years. After beginning his career as a municipal and courts reporter for daily newspapers in upstate New York, Bryan has ... View Full Bio