Robot Space Tracks Data Growth Across 10 Banks for Heartland Financial

Founded in 1981, Heartland Financial USA, Inc. is a $5.7 billion multi-bank holding company centered out of Dubuque, Iowa. As one of the top 100 bank holding companies in the nation, Heartland delivers high-quality financial products and service to clients in the Midwestern, Southwestern, and Western United States with 10 independently chartered banks serving more than 60 communities from 81 banking locations.

With a goal of doubling in size every five to seven years, they needed a tool to help them track, manage, and control their disk growth as their business expands. They started using Robot CPA (job accounting software) from Fortra to allocate costs across all their banks. The disk accounting component of Robot CPA soon led them to Robot Space, disk space management software from Fortra.

Disk Storage: A Finite Universe

While their banks share a code library, each bank has a separate Fiserv library and Heartland processes for each bank individually on the iSeries. They use Robot Space to track and analyze the size of data libraries for allocation to their banks. "I can see the history of my data libraries, how big they are each month, how they change and fluctuate," says Charles Bertsch, Computer Operations Manager. "At any point I can put that information into a nice graph if I want to see the size of library."

They also use Robot Space to track storage percentage thresholds. Charles continues, "We have thresholds in place and Robot will notify us when we cross them. We also have the trigger set on the OS, more so for our test environment. We've really seen the value of Robot Space and hope to push it out to all our servers, not just the production environment."

Robot: Above and Beyond

At any time there are between 1,200-1,500 users on IBM i across Heartland, approximately 500-1,000 individual sessions. "The tricky thing is that each bank has a separate sign in so our holding company users could be signed into 10 different banks with different profiles," explains Charles. With all those users, it's great to know that Robot Space shows who uses the most space to encourage accountability.

As Heartland looked into automating more of their operation to increase efficiency, they found that Fortra has some great tools. "We're a pretty aggressive, fairly fast-growing company," says Charles, "so when we put in an application we want to make sure we can function at twice our size in a few years with the same application. With Robot products that’s not an issue. In fact, you guys help us automate other processes."