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The Background
ESB Bank is a Pennsylvania chartered, FDIC insured stock savings bank, which conducts business through 25 offices in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler and Lawrence counties, Pennsylvania. To compliment their retail and commercial operations, ESB Bank routinely makes investments in U.S. Government, municipal and mortgage backed securities through its subsidiary savings bank and through its investment subsidiary, PennFirst Financial Services, Inc., a Delaware corporation
The Challenge
ESB Bank employs nearly 300 people serving 25 branch offices throughout western Pennsylvania. For years, ESB Bank had been running a Novell network but were informed that by March 2012, they would lose all support for the version they had implemented. While ESB Bank had several Windows servers, they did not have a windows active directory which made it challenging to push out the many client patches to all their Windows PCs. The only logical solution was to streamline their network and convert to a Microsoft system. While EBS Bank had an in-house IT department they needed help with this migration.
ESB Bank was already using Nortec for IT support on various projects, so Nortec had a strong understanding of ESB Bank’s current infrastructure and was ready to seamlessly migrate ESB to a Microsoft system .
The Solution
In order to get approval from ESB Bank’s board to move forward with the migration, Nortec suggested rolling out a Proof of Concept in a lab environment. The Proof of Concept outlined the process of migrating from Novell’s EDirectory and GroupWise to Microsoft AD DS and Exchange, respectively. The exercise also demonstrated how the migration would address the pain points ESB was facing in their current environment. Mark Platz, SVP/Information Technology notes “Nortec helped with a Proof Of Concept in early 2010, then went thru the project plan to make sure we had the hardware, software and resources.” As a result, the monetary investment ESB made for the Proof of Concept helped them get the final approval needed for the full production migration.
The Proof of Concept also furthered ESB’s understanding as to the benefits of Virtualization. This grew the overall project to include Virtualization in the production environment, which lends to a natural implementation of SANs (Storage Area Networks). By implementing Virtualization, ESB could consolidate physical servers to ensure that their data was highly available, to meet strict DR requirements and to reduce the management overhead involved with maintaining physical servers.
Migration started in February 2011 and Nortec was quickly able to implement ESB’s email system from GroupWise to Exchange. Alan Weber, Assistant VP, System Administrator thought the email implementation “went nearly flawlessly. It went far better than we could have hoped for.”
Right now ESB is migrating 2 servers per week and anticipates the finalization of migration to be late November 2011.
Benefits
ESB Bank has never treated technology lightly. Decisions are weighed carefully and investments are thoughtful and considered. Switching to a Microsoft system has made many things easier for the ESB IT staff. From an IT perspective, processes are much more streamlined. Platz notes that “ESB has a younger IT staff – they aren’t taught Novell in school, but they do know Microsoft, so the migration has made things easier on our staff from that perspective as well.”
ESB Bank’s business has not skipped a beat. Nortec established a well thought-out plan which has made ESB’s migration a very smooth transition.
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