Finding a suitable alternative to replace a cost prohibitive enterprise backup solution, while maintaining full backup integrity and increasing flexibility.

Data growth made backup process cost-prohibitive

The organization maintains a diversified portfolio of midstream energy assets across the United States. Besides a central datacenter and a disaster recovery site, the data backup team in this large organization looks after over 40 remote locations. Backups are executed on a mix of physical and virtual servers. A full weekly backup covers 1.3 petabyte of data, with daily incremental backups to capture any changes. The company had used Veritas NetBackup as its backup solution for many years. The organization’s Senior Backup Specialist explains the challenge they faced: “With annual data growth averaging 30 percent, backup license and maintenance costs were growing exponentially. I was very comfortable with Veritas, but the cost to add capacity restricted the flexibility we needed.”

The team looked for another solution and had very clear criteria for this. The new solution must be Windows based as the team did not want to learn a new OS while getting up to speed with a new backup solution. All backups and replications must be completed within a 24-hour window while supporting the remote sites. As data center floor space comes at a premium, it was hoped the new backup solution would shrink the physical backup footprint. And, of course, the organization looked for an overall cost reduction. “Based on our data volumes, hybrid environment, and criteria we looked at various options,” says the Senior Backup Specialist. “Data Protector and NetBackup were the only enterprise ready solutions we found. Having spoken with Veritas and confirmed that there was no flexibility in their licensing model, we moved ahead with a three month proof-of-concept (POC) for Data Protector.”

Details

Substantial cost saving and increased flexibility with Data Protector

After a successful POC demonstrated that Data Protector achieved a 99 percent success rate on all backups, the process of migrating from NetBackup to Data Protector was a lot easier than anticipated. No additional hardware was needed; everything was repurposed and ran concurrently during the transition period. The Data Protector implementation was completed in six months. The immediate benefit was the cost saving, but that was not the only advantage, according to the Senior Backup Specialist: “We realized an immediate software license and maintenance cost saving of close to 50 percent, which was great. However, we also saw that our automatic disaster recovery was easier to configure, and a lot of the more advanced administrative tasks were easier to perform because they could be accomplished with simple text file edits. The GUI was really easy to learn, and even though I had supported NetBackup for over 15 years, I was soon sold on how user-friendly Data Protector is. As an extra bonus we improved our deduplication ratios by partnering Data Protector with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, reducing our storage space requirements.”

When COVID19 hit the globe in March 2020, the Senior Backup Specialist experienced another benefit: “From one day to the next I moved from my office near the datacenter to my home. Thankfully, with Data Protector’s single interface for all backup management we didn’t miss a beat and it was just as easy to protect our data while working remotely as it had been in the office.”

The Micro Focus (now OpenText) professional services and support teams have gone over and above for us on occasion. Their upgrade support and expertise was phenomenal and more than once have they helped us out on a problem which turned out to be unrelated to Data Protector.

Senior Backup Specialist
Fortune 500 Energy Services Provider

Valuable implementation and upgrade support

When NetBackup was in operation, the organization licensed a 3rd party reporting tool to satisfy the very stringent auditing requirements, typical of the oil and gas industry. This reported on each backup process and generated daily failure reports for the auditors. The team has since realized that Data Protector’s builtin reporting features are more than sufficient, and can now cancel the 3rd party reporting tool, realizing further licensing savings.

The Senior Backup Specialist really values the support received during the Data Protector implementation and subsequent upgrades: “The Micro Focus (now OpenText) professional services and support teams have gone over and above for us on occasion. Their upgrade support and expertise was phenomenal and more than once have they helped us out on a problem which turned out to be unrelated to Data Protector.”

We realized an immediate software license and maintenance cost saving of close to 50 percent, which was great. As an extra bonus we improved our deduplication ratios by partnering Data Protector with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, reducing our storage space requirements.

Senior Backup Specialist
Fortune 500 Energy Services Provider