Dupaco Credit Union cuts backup time by 50%

Dupaco Community Credit Union is a not-for-profit, member-owned financial cooperative headquartered in Dubuque, Iowa, serving residents across Iowa, northwest Illinois, and southwest Wisconsin through branch and digital banking channels. They offer full-service consumer and business banking, including savings and checking, loans and mortgages, insurance, and investments/wealth management, and they specialize in personalized financial education and counseling to help members improve their financial well-being. Founded in 1948, Dupaco remains a family- and community-focused operation.

Founded in 1948 by five meatpacking workers pooling $5 each, Dupaco Community Credit Union has grown into a $3.5 billion financial institution serving 178,000 members across Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Despite its scale, Dupaco maintains the community-focused values of its founders, where personal relationships matter more than transaction volume.

"Everyone up to our CEO will take a member phone call," says Joe Ervolino, IT Infrastructure Manager at Dupaco. "We’re always working hard to do what’s right for our members, and we try to uphold that as much as we can."

This commitment to personal service creates unique IT challenges. Ervolino's team must keep 23 branches running while supporting everything from core banking systems to real-time analytics that help staff resolve member issues instantly. Their previous storage platform couldn't deliver the submillisecond latency required for SQL Server reporting that members depend on, while backup processes consumed six to eight hours nightly, creating operational risk and limiting maintenance windows.

"We do a lot of real-time reporting," Ervolino notes. "We have quite a few SQL Server databases that people fire off reports from constantly throughout the day." When members call with transaction questions, staff might need to "load up a database from a year ago and go through all of a member's transactions because we care."

"We run a very lean IT department," Ervolino explains. "The struggle is to not overstaff and instead grow organically with the company." Storage increases seemed relentless, with data piling up for both marketing and member service purposes, while the lack of modern features like deduplication meant inefficient use of precious data centre space.

The turning point came when evaluating storage replacement options. Everpure stood out not just for technical capabilities, but for cultural alignment with Dupaco's values. "They weren't just trying to sell us things," Ervolino recalls. "They just wanted to work with us and help us solve problems."

Dupaco implemented Everpure FlashArray™ systems to address their latency and data management requirements. The solution included Evergreen//Forever™ for nondisruptive upgrades and SafeMode™ Snapshots for ransomware protection critical to financial institutions.

The infrastructure changes directly addressed their operational challenges. "We now have instantaneous snapshots for recovery and reduced our backup process from six to eight hours down to three or under." Ervolino explains.

The space-efficient design addressed their data centre constraints: "Those three arrays have a very small footprint and probably saved us from having an entire rack full of storage." This addressed the data growth challenge head-on. "The Pure platform's deduplication and compression has really helped us mitigate the cost of having to add a lot of storage," Ervolino notes. The efficiency has been so remarkable that Dupaco has operated with the same three arrays for five years, supporting continued growth without requiring additional hardware investments.

To support virtualisation and future cloud initiatives, Dupaco deployed Everpure Cloud Dedicated (formerly Cloud Block Store) for Azure VMware Solution (AVS). This integration allows Dupaco to migrate their workloads to the cloud while benefiting from the data security and operational consistency they expect from Everpure.

The hybrid-cloud approach allowed Dupaco to scale while saving on costs, enabling flexible test environments for their core financial system. "Instead of another five-terabyte set of SQL Server databases, we can have as many as we want. Pure has been a game changer" for running up to ten staging platforms simultaneously. This capability supports Dupaco's role as a beta customer for their financial platform vendor.

"Our total cost of ownership has gone down dramatically," Ervolino notes. "The ROI just looks phenomenal." Over four years, Dupaco realized significant savings while gaining performance and capabilities impossible with their previous platform.

Evergreen//Forever upgrades address the operational realities of Dupaco's lean IT team. Controller upgrades that once required extensive downtime planning now happen during business hours in just over an hour, avoiding costly forklift replacements over multiple years.

"It feels like we have a Ferrari again," Ervolino says about the seamless upgrade experience that keeps infrastructure modern without the traditional refresh cycles that burden IT budgets and planning.

This operational approach lets Ervolino's team focus on member service rather than infrastructure maintenance. The reliability and support experience reinforce the partnership approach that initially attracted Dupaco to Everpure as they expand to include Pure Fusion™ for their team. 

"Everyone I've talked to from Pure sales, support, and after-hours have all been great. They just want to get us back up and running," Ervolino emphasizes.

For a community-focused credit union like Dupaco, technology serves the practical purpose of reliably supporting member service operations, allowing the company to focus on their core mission—to help members achieve "a life worth loving."