Customer Success: First Network Mortgage

Arkeia Provides Crash Insurance For NY-based Mortgage Firm

Company

First Network Mortgage is a Yonkers, NY-based mortgage company that has delivered accurate, saleable and secure closing documents since 1987. The company works with many top mortgage lenders and their law firms throughout New York State.

Challenge

When the building housing First Network Mortgage changed hands, the new owners made changes to the electrical system over the New Year holiday. Apparently a ground line somehow became electrified, causing file systems to become corrupted. As a result, all of First Network Mortgages computers on two floors crashed—including the main Web server and e-mail server— despite having the proper UPS in place.

The crash created a logistical crisis because the company had to be operational the next morning. If they couldn’t deliver closing documents, they would cause a major inconvenience for sellers, buyers, borrowers and the law firms handling the various real estate transactions.

Although a backup server was ready to go, it was several days or a week, out of date. Files being worked on and e-mails received during the week had to be reacquired or recreated. Because of the difficulty in reacquiring the e-mails, the damaged file system was professionally recovered at considerable expense. To ensure such a disaster never happened again, the company turned to Systems Solutions for help.

Systems Solutions is a New York-based systems integrator and solutions provider with over 500 employees and offices in 16 states. The company combines brute size with the flexibility of a start up to design data protection and disaster recovery for companies large and small. They recommended First Network Mortgage deploy Arkeia Network Backup software to protect their data.

Solution

First Network Mortgage RAID 5 configuration consists of three Intel rack mounts with four drives each (including hot spares). Their e-mail and Web servers operate on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server version 8, with Sony DAT/DDS tape backup.

Although the company was able to recover all their data, it still cost them several thousand dollars to do so. They spent additional money making sure all their servers were RAID 5- compliant with hot swappable spares. That’s why they decided to follow Systems Solutions’ recommendation and deploy Arkeia backup and recovery software.

“Today, disaster and recovery capabilities are incorporated in our agreements, and they must be met,” says company CEO Peter Dominguez. “We rely on Arkeia backup software to protect our servers unattended, off premises, every night. To protect our clients, we periodically drill on disaster recovery procedures. If a disaster kills all our computers, we can routinely restore everything in just a few hours. We’ve achieved an increased comfort level with the new system and are less fearful of our business being interrupted.”