INTRODUCTION
Now technology previously available only to major banks is available and affordable for local and regional banks - putting them back on an even playing field in the competition for customers. Every bank can now afford to provide on-line transactions and on-line check images as a service to its customers.

On-line bank records, notably check images, take a large amount of storage. Even for a small bank, this could amount to many gigabytes per month and terabytes in total. Finally, a bank may have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of accounts. Hundreds of customers and employees may access the images at once so the system has to be capable of servicing all these requests.

Fortunately, a high-speed disk array, like FlashDisk whether using Fibre Channel or SCSI, now provides the speed, reliability and capacity to meet these stringent requirements at very low cost - typically well under a nickel a megabyte. For long-term bulk storage of older records, FlashDisk SATA provides on-line rapid access for less than a penny per megabyte. Cost is now no longer a barrier to providing superior customer service. Moreover, in situations where checks are not returned to customers, there is often an actual cost savings.

HOW IT WORKS
Checks are digitized into an image with a scanner. Each check must be coded with at least the account number and this can be done manually or with an Optical Character reader (OCR). With OCR, the check number, amount and clearing date can be recorded too. All the information is recording into the database for each account for retrieval, sorting, selecting, viewing and printing after account access has been authorized. The quantity of storage is proportional to the number of accounts, number of checks and length of time retained on-line and image resolution. However, a tremendous number of checks can be retained in an affordable amount of storage. For example, a typical 2 TB high performance disk array now can hold about 40 million check images at 50 KB per image at a cost of only 1/10th of a penny per check image. The bulk storage device is far less expensive and costs only about 1/100th of a penny per check image.