Case study: Finance Industry

Challenge

  A financial services company in North America was facing the challenge of growing its business and in meeting contractual commitments but was constrained by a bottleneck in its implemented technology. The cost to replace this technology would be over $4,000,000. This amount, plus the business disruption costs and risks of migrating to a different technology, did not justify such an investment. 

  The main system employed by this company was a Trace 1000 Optical Check Reader/Scanner power by a Harris computer. Large-scale storage for the Harris computer was accomplished through nine-track tape drives.

The main system constraint was the writing and reading of data from the Harris computer to the nine-track tape drive. While both the Trace 1000 sub-system and the Harris computer could handle significantly higher data volumes, the nine-track tape drives could not.

  Because the major bottleneck was in reading and writing data to/from the nine-track tape drives, the solution was to replace these drives with the DS1000 Magnetic Tape Emulator (MTE) configured to act as network attached storage devices. The DS1000 MTEs are not constrained by electro-mechanical issues but only by the data transfer rate of the Pertec bus interface. By installing the DS1000s, the company was able to remove the nine-track tape bottleneck and increase the system processing speed up to the native processing speed of the Trace 1000 sub-system.

Since the DS1000 MTE also acts as an intelligent, network attached storage device, the company took advantage of that capability. Via the DS1000 LAN interface, as soon as a file transfer is completed, the DS1000 sends the OCR’d data over the network to remote workstations where further processing is performed. 

  By replacing the nine-track tapes drives with the DS1000 MTEs, the company was able immediately increase the amount of data that it could process by over 100%. This allowed it to increase its potential revenues at an investment that was less than 1% of alternatives solutions. The company was also able to improve its processing time from hours down to minutes, thereby increasing customer satisfaction. The net result to the company was to immediately be able to contract for new business while improving the customer satisfaction for existing customers.