A Retail Giant Strengthens its Data Archival Seamlessly with Cloud-Enabled Backup

Case Study

Retail Giant Strengthens its Data Archival Seamlessly with Cloud-Enabled Backup of On-Premise Apps while Simplifying Encrypted and Reliable Cloud Disaster Recovery

Business Scenario

Our customer is one of the leading retail conglomerate in the region and operational for more than a  decade with geographic presence throughout MENA region having headquarter in UAE. It has enabled happiness in the lives of people from around the world.

The company has approx. 200TB of data across different environment such as OVM, KVM, VMWare, Hyper-V, physical server. The organization policy is to have 14+ years of data retention which is the key challenge. Data keeps growing day by day, this data is archived using physical tape media which is cumbersome process. It requires a lot of manual efforts, physical intervention, physical  media shipment, tape management, etc. Not only the backup but the restoration from these tapes is another challenge. There are thousands of tapes which are difficult to manage and even though once we bring the tape, the recovery process takes very long time and sometimes backup fails.

With the evolution of public cloud low cost object storage, it makes sense for a customer to use the S3 object storage for backup/archival economically but challenges remains where the apps are running on-premise.

Looking into the above mentioned rational, the project objective was to implement a comprehensive solution which integrates with existing enterprise backup environment and enable the low cost object storage in Azure/AWS for long term archival.

The primary objective behind implementation of the backup solution was to  adopt multi-cloud cheap backup strategy to move the on premise archival data on S3 for long archival and provide simplified encrypted and reliable cloud disaster recovery.
Challenges
  • Physical intervention if tape is stuck
  • Physical Media shipment cost is very high
  • Management of 1,000 of tapes and keeps growing
  • Restoration from tapes take longer time
  • Possibility of data loss if tape is lost/missing
  • Possibility of data loss if tape is not accessible or physical damage
  • Its difficult to change the backup solution as tapes are lying since many years.
Solution
  • HPE StoreOnce with Cloudbank Storage

Solution

The customer decided to implement HPE Cloud Bank Storage as it extends the usable capacity of HPE StoreOnce systems by combining low public cloud and/or private object storage costs with HPE StoreOnce deduplication in a hybrid cloud solution. Deduplicating and compressing the data before storing it in the cloud reduces the storage costs of long-term backup data retention by 20X and enables offsite data protection without investing in offsite facilities. The solution integrates seamlessly into existing workflows. Backup data is written to HPE StoreOnce and then, according to policies set within the backup application, all or some of this backup data is copied to the cloud for long-term retention.

Below are the key aspects of the implemented solution for achieving the project objectives.

  • Long-term retention and archive of backups: Using HPE Cloud Bank Storage for long-term archive of backups is a perfect use case. It further reduced the cost by data deduplication and compression before writing to cloud. It integrates with modern backup software for lifecycle management and compliance
  • Multi-cloud choice: HPE Cloud Bank Storage supports multiple S3 compatible object-storage vendors including the leading public cloud providers AWS and Azure and on-premises object-storage vendors such as Scality
  • Cloud-native integration and security: One of the keys to being cloud-ready is the simplicity and completeness of native cloud integration
  • Offsite copies of backups for disaster recovery: A major benefit of using a public cloud as a backup repository is the fact it is offsite
 
HPE GreenLake Cloud Solution

Return on Investment

  • 70% automation in automated backup and recovery Incidents reporting and handling
  • Reduced recovery time objective (RTO) by 50%
  • Reduce IT operations and reduced risk of data loss
  • Save the cost with low cost cloud backup adoption, ROI up to 262% over 5 years

Outcome

  • Automated the archival to low cost cloud storage, no manual tape intervention
  • Cloud Offsite Copy for backup recovery
  • Multi Cloud API aware, bringing customers flexibility
  • Multi-Cloud choice for backup repository
  • Cloud-native integration and security
  • Unlimited scalability at low cost
  • Save for ransomware attached with archival cold tier storage
  • Supported with RMC snapshot protection, no expensive backup software required
  • Supported with major data protection software vendors ( Data Protector, NetBackup, Commvault).
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