First Financial Bank. Highly available, centralized, tiered storage brings simplicity, reliability, and significant cost advantages to operations

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1 Customer Profile First Financial Bank Highly available, centralized, tiered storage brings simplicity, reliability, and significant cost advantages to operations A midsize community bank with a service record that spans over 140 years, First Financial Bank offers a full range of consumer and commercial banking, insurance, and individual wealth management services through a network of 87 banking centers across Ohio, Indiana, and northern Kentucky. With the focus on expanding business functionality and improving cost efficiencies across the enterprise, First Financial Bank engaged with EMC to discuss a technology upgrade for a legacy environment which consisted of multiple platforms, direct-attached storage, and cost and time-consuming optical tape archiving and backup processes. An EMC File System Archiving Assessment, total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis, and proof-of-concept demonstrations were completed before implementing a high-performance, centralized storage infrastructure supported by redundant EMC Symmetrix DMX and EMC Centera storage and archive systems. EMC management, backup, and recovery software is also part of the comprehensive solution as is VMware virtualization technology, which efficiently supports testing, development, and production environments. We purchased a complete and intelligent architecture that now enables us to adapt quickly and easily to different needs, says Kevin Langford, senior vice president and chief information officer. EMC helped us design and implement everything at a cost that enabled a midsize company like ours to attain an advanced technology posture something that would have been difficult to achieve in our previous IT environment. EMC Centera: a cost-efficient, flexible, and reliable solution to address archival challenges EMC initially became involved when First Financial Bank was evaluating online archival solutions for two applications cold storage and check imaging which were using a combination of SAN and optical technology. The results of an EMC File System Archiving Assessment, which included a TCO analysis, revealed that an EMC Centera contentaddressed storage platform supported by EMC DiskXtender, and EMC Xtender software would provide a cost-efficient, flexible, and reliable solution to address the archival challenges associated with these and other applications.

2 These investigations produced compelling evidence that we could save time and money with a Centera-based solution, says Max Abelardo, assistant vice president, Systems Services. The flexibility to scale as needed, the ability to meet high-availability requirements, and the capacity to leverage the platform for other uses such as and our Windows DFS-R File Systems, made the Centera solution ideal. During the assessment period, several other challenges came to light, and it was recommended that in addition to deploying the EMC Centera solution for archiving purposes, the organization would greatly benefit from a consolidated, highly available storage infrastructure powerful and reliable enough to support two other corporate initiatives. The first was the company s planned upgrade and migration to host its core banking system internally, which was previously hosted by an outside service bureau. The second was a technology refresh of the company s Microsoft Windows environment. We purchased a complete and intelligent architecture that now enables us to adapt to different needs quickly and easily. EMC helped us design and implement everything at a cost that enabled a midsize company like ours to attain an advanced technology posture something that would have been difficult to achieve in our previous IT environment. Kevin Langford, Senior Vice President and CIO EMC proof-of-concept demonstrations for EMC Centera and EMC Symmetrix solutions provided First Financial bank with the knowledge that the technology presented would deliver as claimed. The importance of these proof-of-concepts for First Financial Bank was that we had the ability to test in an environment with no risk to us, says Abelardo. Then for EMC to implement these solutions into our environment in almost the same way as they were presented in the proof-of-concepts was a testament to the fact that EMC was able to deliver as promised. Online archives for fixed content, check imaging, and storage With the goal of enabling all images to be stored online, EMC Centera will soon allow for more cost-efficient, easily managed, and more rapidly retrieved online archives. The EMC Centera content-addressed storage platform is a well-established, economical, and highly scalable replacement for a cold storage solution; coupled with EMC DiskXtender software, it now facilitates automatic file archiving of daily reports. A similar EMC Centera-based solution is currently underway to enable check images to be easily archived and deleted based on a predetermined and automated retention policy. In the previous setup, only a certain number of images could be retained in an online format due to the limited capacity of the storage system in place. Older images were first archived off to optical platters, and then after a period of time, stored in a vault that was rapidly filling due to retention regulations. Retrieval from the vault was a time-consuming process as was the purging of records at the end of their retention periods. The EMC Centera platform, in conjunction with EMC DiskXtender and EMC Xtender, will also soon be used to automatically archive after a specified date as well. This powerful new online archival solution is expected to facilitate faster service to customers; make better use of resources through timely deletion, and in the case of , provide

3 single-instance storage capabilities; and allow for improved compliance with internal and external regulations. Flexibility, reliability, and manageability through consolidation Prior to the deployment of the EMC Symmetrix and EMC Centera systems, First Financial Bank had approximately 50 servers with direct-attached storage located within the organization s main headquarters in Hamilton, Ohio. In addition, much of the organization s core banking system from Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. was outsourced to a service bureau. Today, an upgraded version of that banking system now resides in-house, driven by an IBM iseries server platform and supported by powerful, highly reliable EMC Symmetrix DMX storage. The organization s Microsoft Exchange and file system storage environments also now benefit from advanced EMC Symmetrix DMX technology. The system we built turned out to be flexible beyond our expectations and gave us the opportunity to integrate our Windows and iseries environments, says Abelardo. The value of this integration was something that we really wanted to leverage because in the past, the disks have been separate and it was very expensive to partition and grow or shrink as needed. It was also hard to get an overall picture of our disk utilization or effectively manage storage because it was in so many places. EMC delivers what it promises. To get your hands on technology that does what it needs to do with fantastic support from EMC Global Services is worthwhile, and we highly recommend EMC. Max Abelardo, Assistant Vice President of Systems Services Having a single, centralized EMC storage infrastructure supported by advanced EMC ControlCenter storage resource and device management software enables the IT staff to oversee the organization s entire storage environment easily. From this single-view perspective, better performance analysis, tuning, and capacity planning is possible. Up-sizing or downsizing as needed has also been simplified and no longer requires rebuilding everything or disrupting applications. We have seen tremendous value in being able to have one disk storage system for all of our most critical applications, says Langford. Fewer moving parts typically means fewer errors and less administration, which in turn means that the staff can devote more time to moving our business forward and less time managing the technology. Continuous operations, zero data loss As with most financial institutions, data must be protected and continuously accessible a mandate shared by both customers and regulatory agencies. When it comes to our core banking and systems, high availability and zero data loss are paramount, says Abelardo. With clients and banking, you essentially get one chance, so our job is to keep a data center outage from affecting them. We increase our odds by ensuring our systems on the backend are as robust as possible. The company s stringent recovery requirements are supported by secondary EMC Symmetrix DMX and EMC Centera systems housed within the organization s remote site, located approximately 20 miles from the main data center. A key component of First Financial Bank s disaster recovery solution, EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility disaster recovery software (SRDF ), facilitates the automatic mirroring of Symmetrix-based data

4 from the main operations center to the remote center. Centera Archive Replicator (CAR) supports the asynchronous remote replication process for the EMC Centera platform. EMC helped us build a disaster recovery solution that now enables us to fully recover our core banking system [Jack Henry SilverLake] in about 25 minutes, says Abelardo. In addition to the EMC SRDF disaster recovery solution, First Financial Bank also takes advantage of EMC TimeFinder software which provides local recovery-point and backup functionality for Microsoft Windows and IBM iseries environments. TimeFinder and SRDF mitigated the management of two separate systems with a journalbased solution, says Abelardo. We only manage one system, and we have these tools at our disposal to recreate testing, development, training, and reporting, as necessary on demand. This is a big advantage given our lean team. EMC NetWorker is also part of First Financial Bank s comprehensive backup and recovery environment. EMC NetWorker has helped us consolidate over 100 systems at different sites into one backup suite, says Abelardo. That backup suite is already leveraging the high-availability system that we have by being offsite. So when clients need data restored, we re not going to five different mediums. We re going to one, and we re providing that at a much faster rate. Compliance and cost efficiency through ILM First Financial Bank s new centralized and tiered storage infrastructure also has set the stage for improved information lifecycle management which is expected to enable the company to better support regulatory compliance in the most cost-efficient manner possible. For the information lifecycle for securities-related portions of our company, we now have the flexibility of maintaining that data indefinitely and without having to worry about it costing too much and consuming more disk than it needs to, says Abelardo. By the same token, for data that needs a set lifecycle, we can set those blocks of time and ensure that data will vanish from our systems without a huge effort. Virtualization technology speeds development and testing The use of VMware virtualization technology, including VMware ESX Server with VMotion and VirtualCenter is allowing for a very quick ramp-up of the organization s infrastructure build for migrating s and setting up the core banking environment. We need lots of test environments, which if you equate those to physical environments becomes very costly and time-consuming, says Abelardo. With the VMware infrastructure, we can partition about 12 different environments by building one template which saves a considerable amount of time. Several instances were encountered during the production build where a server environment was required immediately. The ability to leverage VMware allowed First Financial Bank s IT team to address these unexpected needs quickly while still preserving the organization s aggressive time line. We had about a day s notice on two virtual machines that needed to be created for some applications that were essential components to the Jack Henry system, says Abelardo. We had virtual templates, and it literally took about 15 minutes. There was no way we could have deployed a physical box in the same short period of time.

5 Additional VMware advantages include cost-savings related to the number of hardware acquisitions necessary to build a test and development environment. A lot of time the test and development environments don t really pass financial scrutiny because they are temporary, says Abelardo. Being able to justify a larger piece of hardware to satisfy more hosts, create those environments on-the-fly, destroy them, and rebuild them as needed has given us value that we would not have otherwise had with a physical environment. Delivered as promised Within a very short timeframe, First Financial Bank has been able to carry out the rapid implementation of much of its core banking system upgrade; support a technology refresh for its Microsoft Windows environment; and provide online archival support for a growing number of applications all with a powerful new centralized and tiered EMC storage infrastructure that is highly reliable and flexible enough to address both current and future needs. We re now able to grow with our business much more flexibly by easily adding capacity to our centralized storage environment, regardless of which platform or which application might need it, says Langford. The simplicity of the solution and the time it saves are of great value to us, as is EMC s business recovery technology. EMC delivers what it promises, says Abelardo. To get your hands on technology that does what it needs to do with fantastic support from EMC Global Services is worthwhile, and we highly recommend EMC. EMC Corporation Hopkinton Massachusetts In North America EMC 2, EMC, EMC ControlCenter, DiskXtender, Xtender, NetWorker, TimeFinder, SRDF, Symmetrix, and where information lives are registered trademarks and Centera and Symmetrix DMX are trademarks of EMC Corporation. VMware is a registered trademark and ESX Server, VirtualCenter, and VMotion are trademarks of VMware, Inc. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Copyright 2007 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 01/07 Customer Profile H2581