Virtualization projects have won lots of praise as a wonder drug to fight energy headaches by reducing servers. But it’s not magic-the left-over servers don’t disappear into thin air. One possible solution can be found at Summit National Bank, which is using the servers as part of a new disaster recovery site.

The $75-million asset bank, which has four branches in Wyoming and Montana, started its virtualization project in January, buying a HP ProLiant ML370 G6 with 64 gigabytes of RAM, 2.5 terabytes of storage and a two-quad processor, on which it virtualized nine servers using Microsoft’s Hyper-V software. The project resulted from a desire to add the power of four servers to its five existing IBM xSeries 306m physical servers to accommodate new products and services.

Jonathan Tinsley, Summit’s CISO, says the bank decided against a cloud service for remote backup out of concerns over control-which led the bank down the path to using its old servers as part of disaster recovery. The bank also had to select a provider. “We evaluated Symantec Backup Exec and AppAssure Replay,” says Tinsley. “Replay cost around $4,000. Symantec wasn’t any cheaper, and Replay seemed to handle restores a lot faster.”

Summit used one of the IBM servers as a local back-up server running Microsoft Backup, and another as a remote back-up server at another branch. The ProLiant runs a Replay agent program, with the two back-up servers running the core Replay back-up application.

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