Business issues
The sun never sets on RBC Financial Group's financial empire. Spanning 33 countries, the company's 60,000 employees roll up their sleeves to deliver financial services in the personal and commercial sectors to 12 million clients. Meeting customer expectations around the globe means that RBC Financial Group places a premium on reliability and availability of their IT infrastructure devices and data respectively. With RBC Financial Group experiencing a 30 percent compound annual data growth rate, they were inspired to take a long-term strategic view of their IT requirements.

Solutions
RBC Financial Group's expansive infrastructure matches its global operations. Four data centers across Canada deliver 11,000 MIPS of processing power, 43.2 terabytes (TBs) of disk and 585 TBs of raw tape data. The organization phased out its older automated cartridge systems by replacing them with seven StorageTek. PowderHorn 9310s. It also replaced the less reliable tape drives with 240 T9840 StorageTek tape drives.

In a separate phase, RBC Financial Group deployed six StorageTek VSMs to replace the decade-old automated tape libraries. And most recently, they installed the new StorageTek VSM 4 to help them manage data growth more efficiently and cost effectively.

Financial benefits
A primary benefit to RBC Financial Group has been a 99 percent reduction in labor hours needed to administer the StorageTek ACSs and tape drives versus the phased out legacy devices. Also, the StorageTek VSM solution helped RBC Financial Group cut its MIPS growth by 50 percent in the first year of deployment.

Business benefits
Over time, the IT team gained renewed confidence in RBC Financial Group's reliable StorageTek-based tape solutions. In fact, the number of media and drive errors fell so precipitously that Dan Ledgerwood, RBC Financial Group's team leader of SMS and Virtual Tape, was able to "re-launch" tape services to now receptive end users. Thus, more data has been migrated from disk to inexpensive tape media in accordance with the organization 's data life cycle management plan.

Technology benefits
RBC Financial Group achieved its reliability objectives by replacing old libraries with StorageTek PowderHorn libraries and T9840 tape drives. Logged annual failures and troubleshooting labor hours were slashed from 500 and 1,600 hours respectively to 25 (95 percent reduction) and 15 (99 percent reduction).