As the amount of data that businesses depend on grows, the need for faster and more reliable data backup becomes even more crucial. When your backup system begins to drain time and resources, it can affect a firm’s ability to deliver time-sensitive information that drives revenue. Bird & Bird, an international law firm, recognized that their tape backup system was slowly eating away at their ability to protect their data and respond to clients efficiently. Bird & Bird focuses on telecoms, multimedia, information technology and intellectual property legal issues through 21 offices worldwide. Their clients include some of the most innovative, technology advanced global companies, and in the legal industry… time is crucial. Accessing legal documents quickly is paramount in delivering legal advice that meets their client’s business objectives.
The Data Backup Problem
Bird & Bird consolidated much of their data management to a central London location four years ago. As their business and client roster grew, so did their quantity of data. Finding a solution to manage data backup effectively became a priority. Jon Spencer, Infrastructure Manager at Bird & Bird stated, “A full backup that started on Friday was filling about 20 LTO-3 tapes with 12 TB at 1.5:1 compression and often ran into Monday or Tuesday.” As tape backup was conducted at a se
parate facility for security issues, it could take hours for users who often needed to recall documents from the backup tapes. Another concern was the time and resources consumed by tape backup. Because of the amount of time Bird & Bird’s weekly tape backup was taking, if the tape was still in use, they could not restore files from their media.
Evaluate Multiple Disk Backup Vendors
Spencer concluded that adding more tape backup would not solve his problems and decided to explore disk-backup systems. After researching multiple vendors, Bird & Bird decided to evaluate five industry leaders and the firm borrowed disk backup appliances from Data Domain, ExaGrid Systems, FalconStor Software, Quantum as well as Symantec’s NetBackup PureDisk software product to begin an evaluation process.
Bird & Bird set-up these five products interfaced with their media server and then ran a series of data backups and restores using the same Exchange backups and flat-file data each time. Spencer said, “Evaluations are important to me as you get an indication as to the efficiency of the organization and you get to meet the techie guys too.” Knowing the level and commitment of customer service during and after the sale can be a decisive factor. Although Spencer concluded from the testing that there was little difference between the five manufacturers in terms of backup/restore speed, several products were eliminated because of scalability issues or because the product would have required changing the backup application. Spencer also decided not to go with a source data deduplication product because of concerns about the effect on host systems of a source-based dedupe product.
Bird & Bird narrowed down the original five vendors to two, ExaGrid Systems and Data Domain. In the end, Bird & Bird went with ExaGrid Systems based on its ability to centrally manage geographically dispersed units and its user interface. Spencer also liked ExaGrid’s smaller organization as he concluded ExaGrid was more adaptable to Bird & Bird’s specific needs and provides proactive customer service support.
In Data Backup, Look at What Approach Best Solves Your Needs
Bird & Bird achieved their backup objectives with ExaGrid systems offering 20TB of capacity in London and 1TB in Hong Kong. The law firm runs daily incremental and weekly full backups through the ExaGrid devices and archives to a tape library once a month.
Unlike other devices, the ExaGrid devices implement target-based data deduplication and carry out data deduplication post-process. This process means data deduplication is done after data has been sent to the device and is held in a landing area. According to Spencer, the post-process data deduplication holds no disadvantage. "I don't take too much notice of what the ExaGrids are doing once the backup is finished. As soon as the job has completed, it is available for restore if required and that is all we care about.” Bird & Bird has achieved a data deduplication ratio of 14:1.
Bird & Bird has almost immediate availability of restores, which now take minutes rather than hours. They keep between three weeks and eight weeks of backups on the ExaGrid machines. The backup window has been reduced by a third and is carried out with seven or eight backup streams instead of the two or three it could manage with tape.
Are your backups draining time and resources?
Just like Bird & Bird did, seek out alternative disk backup solutions, evaluate the capabilities and find a system that delivers the best value for your business.