News highlights:
* Legacy backup infrastructures are ill-suited to support the rapid adoption of virtualisation. Implementing next-generation back-up and recovery from EMC can eliminate bottlenecks and speed broader virtualised deployments.
* The third largest financial institution in Poland, Bank Zachodni, uses EMC back-up and recovery solutions to protect both its physical and virtual infrastructures.
* A large city in Finland, the city of Oulu, completely eliminated tape from its back-up and recovery processes and reduced back-up costs by 28%.
* UK-based Derby College created a “hands off” back-up environment in a back-up redesign to support its virtualised environment.
* Organisations can take specific steps related to back-up and recovery to accelerate the virtualisation of their physical servers. This is increasingly important as the percentage of applications deployed on virtual infrastructure advances beyond 50%.
Full story:
Customers of EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) continue to see measurable and tangible benefits from EMC back-up and recovery solutions.
As customers architect back-up infrastructures for their VMware environments, they often realise that legacy back-up and recovery methods, including traditional back-up software and tape, cannot offer the breadth of functionality that they need as they move from a physical to a virtual environment.
The key to a successful and rapid transition to a redesigned back-up infrastructure is choosing a solution that manages the existing environment while also aligning well to the needs of the emerging virtualised one. EMC can offer a broad portfolio of highly integrated next-generation back-up products that satisfy the needs of customers, regardless of where they are in their virtualisation process.
EMC executive quote:
Kelly Ferguson, Director of EMEA Marketing, EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division
“Customers from across Europe are reporting tangible cost savings and operational improvements from EMC back-up and recovery solutions. This release shows how EMC customers are transforming to next-generation back-up and are accelerating their virtualisation initiatives. Virtualisation is only part of the equation as there are also many physical assets to back-up, including servers and desktops. Unlike competitive offerings, EMC provides our customers with back-up and recovery solutions to meet the needs of their physical and their virtual environments.”
Flexibility to address both physical, virtual
Bank Zachodni is Poland's third largest financial institution. One of the bank's key strategic IT initiatives is its journey to a cloud computing model.
As a foundation for its move to the cloud, Bank Zachodni has mapped out its data protection strategy with a focus on fully automating its disaster recovery process and deploying modernised back-up and recovery solutions that align to the needs of a virtualised environment.
The bank chose EMC Avamar deduplication software and systems and has realised distinct benefits for both its virtual and physical environments. This has had a direct impact on its transition to a cloud-based computing environment.
Krzysztof Waszkiewicz, VMware/WINTEL Server Support Team Manager, Bank Zachodni WBK: “In addition to drastically reduced back-up windows due to Avamar's highly effective deduplication, we find Avamar's simplicity and flexibility to be most impressive as a solution for the VMware platform. We have the flexibility to do both image and file level back-ups and we've found it to be equally cost-effective for both our VMware and physical environments. In addition, a wide portfolio of plug-ins is available, which encompass a broad range of applications and operating system clients. Our Avamar implementation was simple and trouble-free, and now so are our back-up and recoveries.”
Complete tape elimination
The city of Oulu in Finland, population 141 671, had been backing up to tape. As it virtualised servers, its daily incremental back-ups began taking 12-14 hours, and full back-ups were running through the entire weekend.
It was fast becoming clear that, for its growing virtual environment, tape was no longer viable. To meet all its requirements, the city of Oulu implemented a combination of EMC NetWorker unified back-up software, Avamar and Data Domain deduplication storage systems.
Marko Niskala, Infrastructure Manager of city of Oulu: “With tape, we simply had no back-up window left. With EMC, we've successfully solved our back-up issues and reduced our data protection costs by 28% in the process. We are now 70% virtualised and have fast back-ups we can count on.”
Eighty percent virtualised
UK-based Derby College, one of the largest further education colleges in the country, had tape-based back-up processes that had become unmanageable and were inhibiting the completion of its server consolidation project.
Tape back-up and tape management were manually intensive and were consuming one full-time employee's efforts. Daily incremental back-ups were taking as long as 24 hours, and restores were taking as long as three days, factoring in tape transportation services.
Then Derby switched to EMC Avamar for back-up of its now 80% virtualised environment. Today, the college performs full daily back-ups in only three to four hours and enjoys rapid restores and dramatically reduced management time.
Ian McCormick, IT Infrastructure Manager for Derby College: “Back-up at Derby College has gone from a full-time job to essentially a no-time job. Our daily back-up window time has been reduced by a factor of six, and time spent on managing our back-ups is negligible - basically more of a monitoring process. In addition, restores are simple - literally a few clicks and we're done. Avamar performs as promised, which is a testament to EMC. EMC has the expertise to make sure products like Avamar work well with VMware, and there's a significant level of comfort for us in that.”
As each of these customer experiences demonstrates, there is a clear correlation between an organisation's ability to transform back-up infrastructure and processes and its ability to realise aggressive goals for server virtualisation.
In 2010, customers saw an important tipping point for virtualisation when the percentage of applications deployed on virtual infrastructure surpassed the percentage of applications deployed on physical infrastructure. This race to realise the benefits of virtualisation puts significant pressure on aging, tape-based infrastructures that were never intended to support virtual workloads.
The organisations that are able to successfully deploy back-up and recovery solutions that reduce or eliminate the use of tape, that adapt to both physical and virtual infrastructures and that deliver the operational and financial efficiencies required in modern IT shops, are the ones that put themselves in the position to realise the highest yields from their server virtualisation initiatives.
Additional resources:
* Download the ESG report: Backup and Recovery of Large Scale VMware Environments
* Visit the new EMC Backup and Recovery Blog site: The Backup Window
* Visit the EMC Backup and Recovery Products Web site
Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN.
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EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyse their most valuable asset - information - in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.
EMC, Avamar, Data Domain and NetWorker are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.
This release contains “forward-looking statements” as defined under the Federal Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (iv) risks associated with managing the growth of our business, including risks associated with acquisitions and investments and the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (v) fluctuations in VMware's operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (vi) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (vii) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (viii) component and product quality and availability; (ix) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (x) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xi) war or acts of terrorism; (xii) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (xiii) fluctuating currency exchange rates; and (xiv) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.
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