FirstMerit Banks on IBM Storage Virtualization

FirstMerit Banks on IBM Storage Virtualization

IBM today announced that FirstMerit Bank has streamlined its internal and Internet banking applications by implementing a solution built on IBM’s storage virtualization technology, helping the bank save nearly $300,000 on technology costs, while at the same time supporting more than 1.6 million financial transactions per month.

FirstMerit Bank, headquartered in Akron, Ohio, serves more than 500,000 household and business customers and has amassed an enormous 10 terabyte repository of transaction records and financial data, the equivalent of about 10 million books. The bank, which has a growing customer base hungry for the latest in online, on demand banking technology, needed better performance and cost-saving technologies to update its aging infrastructure, support internal applications and business processes and move its Internet presence to the next level.

“When taking a snapshot of our banking infrastructure, we saw two key issues — much of the server and storage space we had was not being fully utilized and then in other areas, various applications and transactions were causing a bottleneck,” said Dave Samic, Senior Network Analyst, FirstMerit Corporation. “By installing an IBM storage virtualization solution at the forefront, we were able to spread the demands on the infrastructure and free up more capacity to deliver information and data as our customer base and their demands grew.”

Read the complete Press Release