PROTECTION I DEDUPLICATION
its production of high-end spirits to leading-edge information systems and data management solutions for supporting more than 1,500 users across 30 corporate sites. “We’re big users of server virtualisation and are always looking for ways to increase operational efficiencies while managing exponential storage growth and protecting vital corporate information,” he says.
Data Management Environment A team of approximately 15 people is responsible for overseeing Chivas Brothers’ corporate network, which includes the WAN, LAN, file servers, office applications and PCs. A predominantly Microsoft shop with XP on the desktop, Chivas supports about 150 physical servers running Microsoft Windows 2003 and 2008 as well as another 100 virtual machines running on eight VMware ESX servers, which are dispersed across four main datacentres in Paisley, Dumbarton and Elgin, Scotland as well as Hammersmith, England. In addition to the full Microsoft Office software suite, the company uses Microsoft Exchange Server for its corporate email system with Active Directory and SharePoint. An Oracle-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system plays a pivotal role in supporting overall operations.
Ongoing business expansion has caused Chivas Brothers’ data storage requirements to surge by more than 30 percent annually. The company relies on a series of HP Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) disk storage systems for handling 19 TBs of production data. Chivas also leverages its HP EVA storage to support a migration to disk-based data protection, which has dramatically increased the speed and reliability of backups and recoveries. “We deployed both disk-based backups and deduplication technology, which enabled us to streamline operations while reducing our overall investment in tape media,” says Gilfillan. “Most important, we now can ensure data integrity for all mission-critical applications.”
Seeking Potent Backup & Recovery As its data storage requirements grew, Chivas Brothers found it increasingly hard to meet daily incremental and weekly full backup windows. The tape-based systems couldn’t move data fast enough, so backups would run through the weekend and into Monday mornings, which proved problematic. Additionally, the company was investing heavily in tape-based media, since daily incremental and weekly full backups required multiple tapes at both its central and remote
locations.Moreover, tape-based backups took too much time and effort to manage, especially when failed jobs required remote restarts over the weekend. On most days, the backup administrator spent up to half his time overseeing the process and troubleshooting problems. System administration was further burdened by the need to oversee multiple instances of legacy data management software with separate, decentralized management consoles. Previously, Chivas Brothers had relied on CA ARCserve and HP Data Protector to handle backup and recovery operations, but found both solutions lacking functionality and ease of use. Additionally, the team faced persistent issues with recoveries as
pulling data from tape could take up to 48 hours once the tape was retrieved from offsite storage and cataloged. “Requiring up to two days to restore important data was unacceptable,” notes Gilfillan. “We knew there was a better way to reduce recovery time and effort.” Chivas Brothers felt the addition of disk would improve backup performance and reliability while reducing operator intervention and decreasing the costs of relying heavily on tape.
To enhance its litigation readiness and meet growing compliance demands, Chivas Brothers wanted to retain more data on disk, but was concerned about the amount of redundant data across core applications, including its Oracle ERP and Exchange systems. Duplicate data slowed backups at its main datacentre and four remote sites. “We wanted to improve the cost, ease of use and reliability of data protection,” adds Gilfillan. “We felt the addition of deduplication would produce significant savings while enabling us to keep more data on disk longer.”
CommVault’s Full Menu of Complementary Capabilities
In searching for a more flexible, resilient data protection foundation, Chivas Brothers reviewed the competitive landscape to determine their preferred deduplication approach. The company looked at EMC Avamar, which they worried would be costly as it required a second solution for archiving data off to tape. Also considered was a virtual tape library (VTL) recommended by HP, but Chivas Brothers found the VTLs to be prohibitively expensive as well
In contrast, Chivas Brothers was impressed with CommVault® Simpana® software, which blended disk-based enterprise backup and recovery with embedded deduplication capabilities. “I really liked CommVault’s integrated deduplication, which seemed much more seamless than EMC Avamar,” notes Gilfillan. “We also appreciated that Simpana software was built to leverage disk storage, whereas others were too focused on making their disks look like tape.”
Chivas Brothers also sought a solution for streamlining business continuity at its remote sites and found CommVault’s Continuous Data Replication (CDR) appealing as it would eliminate tape management at multiple locations. Equally impressive was the full spectrum of functionality, encompassing archiving, enterprise search and other key data management features that CommVault supported in its unified data management platform. “There’s much more to CommVault than just backup,” adds Gilfillan. “The other modules were certainly worth investigating down the line and this element of growth was appealing.”
Chivas Brothers also felt CommVault was well positioned to handle a mixed environment as Simpana software was developed to perform well in physical, virtual and cloud-based environments. CommVault’s ability to deliver end-to-end data protection for both physical and virtual server environments was a major plus as it would enable Chivas Brothers to achieve the
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