Challenge

A growing consumer lender had the foresight to invest in hybrid cloud-ready active/active data centers to improve overall reliability, performance and efficiency. Underlying technology included Dell EMC's DPS suite, plus its Avamar and Data Domain data backup and recovery protection solutions.

However, with a number of overlapping backup strategies, the customer sought WWT's assistance to identify and implement a streamlined, comprehensive data protection plan for its new data centers.

Solution

In evaluating the requirements needed to protect all of the customer's data sets, we saw that more capacity was required. Together with the customer, we determined the best course of action was to "flip the switch" on the hybrid cloud, which would allow the offloading of older backups. In reviewing how often files were restored, the customer determined it could easily offload to the cloud data older than three months.

Our solution consisted of a streamlined product comparison between the two best products on the market, enabled by the lab environment of our Advanced Technology Center (ATC). We configured both solutions on-site for the customer and ran workload analyses to determine which best met their needs. One featured 100TB of cloud storage via Dell's Virtustream Storage Cloud; the second featured comparable storage from another top provider. This setup let the customer quickly compare performance and costs in its own environment.

The analysis showed that Dell EMC's Virtustream would best meet the customer's needs. It also showed that using Dell's Data Domain to control tiering would provide superior data reduction capabilities.

Conclusion

By providing the customer with several options and empirical data through a streamlined product comparison in our ATC, we accelerated their ability to to make an informed decision. The new backup strategy is currently being initiated and, with WWT's support and expertise, the organization is taking full advantage of its new hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Technologies