Customer Profile
FirstAgain LLC
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Synegi
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Navigating the future of technology
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San Diego Start-Up Provisions for Exponential Growth
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FirstAgain LLC is a finance company that believes excellent credit customers deserve innovative products and outstanding customer experiences, both of which are sorely lacking in today's lending environment of commodity products and undifferentiated customer service. Its founders intend to change that, Again. Previously, they founded PeopleFirst.com, which became the nation's largest online auto finance company, prior to its sale to Capital One in 2001. PeopleFirst pioneered the concept of Blank Check® auto lending, forever raising the bar for direct auto lending to people with excellent credit (Blank Check® is a registered trademark of Capital One Services, Inc).
Now, they have formed FirstAgain.com, brought together another team of passionate, experienced people, and together they have created an even more revolutionary product for excellent credit customers - a competitively priced, "unsecured" loan for virtually any of your personal financing needs. Finally, a loan without the hassle or need to pledge your house or vehicle, or the burden of high rates. Imagine financing your home improvement project without having to pledge your house, or purchasing a vehicle and having the title free and clear! And, its done all online. Virtually everything is done electronically (no paper), making this not only the most convenient loan you will ever receive but also the most environmentally friendly.
As FirstAgain’s Mario Cataldo knows, wearing the CIO’s hat at a startup has its rewards as well as its challenges. Perhaps the biggest plus is having the luxury of designing an IT infrastructure from the ground up, free from the legacy issues that weigh down decision making in established organizations. The challenges involve resources: FirstAgain spent over two years without revenues while they developed their platforms and fine-tuned their business processes. That meant laying the groundwork for an enterprise-class infrastructure without the benefit of an enterprise-class budget, so balancing future requirements with the need to “get it right the first time” was critically important.
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Having to swap out your storage and backup solution with hyper-growth is too disruptive, so we needed a solution capable of supporting our business from development, QA, and beyond - maximizing our return on every expenditure.
- Mario Cataldo, FirstAgain CIO
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The Business
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A transaction-intensive e-commerce business, with no corresponding bricks-and-mortar storefront, delivering 24/7 services. Protection of online assets and flexibility to adapt to changing regulatory and compliance requirements are baseline needs.
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The Foundation
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The primary data center is located at a secure site several miles from their downtown headquarters. The platform includes Intel-based blade servers, Microsoft .Net, Cisco and other various leading-edge hardware and software technologies.
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The Future
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Backend processing needs are expected to grow exponentially in terms of online storage requirements and the capability to support analytical, operational and management reporting and accounting processes. Additional business continuity requirements will also step up in line with business growth.
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Success in the financial services industry requires an information infrastructure that’s resilient and highly reliable, qualities synonymous with EMC's CLARiiON family. FirstAgain choose a CX 300 SAN to satisfy the transactional I/O of their data base applications, and for the functionality offered by Navisphere, CLARiiON’s OS. SnapView software creates local point-in-time copies of data that can be used for test, backup and recovery operations - a critical operation for the company which will enable their DBA's to carve off slices of real time data for testing and analysis. CLARiiON’s PowerPath provides load balancing across the SAN as well as immediate failover in the event that any component in the critical data path malfunctions. CLARiiON’s scalability - from 500 gigabytes to over 20 terabytes - provides flexibility and room for growth.
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A major hurdle for SAN adoption has traditionally been the high cost of fabric switches, the ASIC-based devices that direct traffic between hosts and storage. QLogic altered that equation in 2003 with the introduction of their affordable SANbox stackable switch family, a 16 port 1U Fibre Channel switch with four 10Gb/sec backplane ports. A truly stackable switch, it allows up to 128 non-blocking data ports in an 8U rack space. QLogic's SANsurfer Management Suite unifies remote Fibre Channel HBA and switch management control into a single point-and-click console using on-site or remote hosts.
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When it came to backup software, cost of management outweighed cost of acquisition, with issues like speed of recovery translating directly into productivity gains. CommVault’s Galaxy, with its Common Technology Engine, provides the robust feature set of an enterprise class solution, and at the same time simplifies things like disk-to-disk backup operations. Galaxy also provides a level of reporting and troubleshooting that keeps requirements for staff work at the remote data center at an absolute minimum, another key consideration given the company’s small IT staff.
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Ideally a tape backup solution should simplify and automate backup administration and reduce cartridge handling. FirstAgain went a step further: engineering a backup system which provided an additional layer of redundancy, reduced the amount of time spent at the remote location and saved on software agents, as well. An Overland NEO 2000 Ultrium tape library was placed at headquarters, several miles away from their SAN and an inexpensive D2D staging array running RAID 5 in the datacenter. Daily backups are performed “over a LAN” by taking advantage of a high-speed data link between the two locations and the NEO's iSCSI Gigabit Ethernet port. Putting the library at headquarters gives great flexibility and control of their mission critical backup data set, and iSCSI seamlessly enables SCSI's block level protocol to cost effectively go the distance.
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Integrating the Pieces Into a Seamless System
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| Implementing and integrating a high performance SAN is a complex undertaking, requiring broad cross-platform experience and the skills to assimilate multiple technologies. That responsibility fell to Synegi’s lead engineer, Randy de los Santos, an industry veteran with over 200 HA/DR implementations to his credit. Working closely with FirstAgain’s IT team, and field engineers like QLogic’s outstanding Chris Coleman, the SAN was configured and brought up for testing. The next part - backing up from disk to tape over a long distance network connection - was “cutting edge, to say the least” in the words of Lee Payne, Overland’s top iSCSI engineer, who eagerly took on the challenge and made it almost look easy. “Our (meaning Synegi’s) involvement with this project began in late 2004,” commented William Hammett, Synegi Account Manager, and FirstAgain made it abundantly clear that it wanted both performance and value." Over time a short list of vendors was winnowed down to those referenced above, and challenges - like having QLogic’s SANbox 5202 Fibre Channel switch certified on EMC’s CLARiiON platform, were overcome. The company went live in October 2006, and to date, operational execution and performance have been excellent.
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Synegi |
2132 Michelson Drive |
Irvine, CA 92312 |
Tel: 949.222.0088
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