138% ROI Gained, Backup Failures Eliminated When Worldwide Leadership Resource Company Switches from Backup Exec to Dell AppAssure

Environmental Snapshot:

• Exchange mailboxes: 105
• SQL server: 4 running MS dynamics, which has the financial software, SalesLogic database. Also several web-based databases for clients, including Ipswich
• Windows file servers: 2
• Virtualization: VMware VSphere 4.1
• TB of data total: 7 TB

Business Challenges

Protecting nearly 7TB of intellectual property is serious business. As a global leadership development and training company, Linkage Inc. delivers content all over the globe to consultants and leaders at a moment’s notice. Having access to this data round the clock and around the globe means that Linkage depends on very high availability with 100% uptime for its IT infrastructure. Intellectual property is Linkage’s bread and butter.

“Our organization relies on data being highly available for both our consultants and customers,” says Scott Poole, Linkage’s Network Manager. “Lost data is not an option for us. I liken it to a plant that’s manufacturing a toy – we don’t have the toy; instead, we have intellectual property. This is the product we deliver, so it’s very serious when any of our servers goes down – and it’s very expensive.”

“I’ve never been a big fan of Symantec,” continues Poole. “The backups were cumbersome, unreliable, expensive, and we had constant software failures with the product. We had a huge problem backing up Exchange. It was failing almost every night, and sometimes, files on the file server were just not being backed up. I put in lots of calls to Symantec, and they recommended patches, but that just made it worse.”

The data loss scenario and the expense potential of failed backups were risks that Linkage carried on a daily basis, and that kept Poole up at nights. Linkage did full backups every night – 1.4TB compressed on tapes, which took 12 hours to complete. More often than not, Poole would find that the backups were still running at 10am, affecting online productivity. Not only that, Poole found that his backup product, Backup Exec, was failing more times than it was succeeding. “I’d say that only three days in a month would I get a decent backup,” says Poole.

One of Poole’s biggest fears was that he’d have to restore something big from the tape but could not determine what was there, what had been saved, or what had been backed up. This ongoing problem was easily costing Linkage $10,000 a year, with ongoing Symantec and tape drive maintenance contracts, tape replacement, and server maintenance. In addition, it was costing the company 10+ hours a week of staff time just to deal with the backup failures and issues.

“When I first came on board, I identified a number of pain points within our IT infrastructure,” notes Poole. “Backup/Disaster Recovery was on my list, right behind server virtualization. When I tried to convince the company of the necessary expenditures we needed for DR, like a new backup solution and a new SAN, I got resistance. But then two incidences changed everything. First, our financial server crashed and couldn’t be brought back. A new server delivery took four days, then we had to find a complete backup of the data, then locate the software and get it loaded. We were down in accounting for a whole week, and all our payroll and timesheets were affected. The second issue was that one mailstore crashed due to overloading. It took us two full days to troubleshoot, take the server down, and find out that it was a drive that was filled up. If we had had more information at the outset – like high availability and application aware features – we would have known what the issue was. With intellectual property on the line, our company can’t be down on email for any length of time. It was a disaster.”

The approval for the upgrade to Dell AppAssure came within days after this last incident.

Solution

Poole had been right in the middle of putting together a comprehensive IT plan for Linkage’s Board of Directors that included virtualization, DR capabilities, high availability, and disk imaging. He researched cloud-based backup and storage products, but cost and restore processes were both expensive and time-consuming for Poole. When he found Dell AppAssure, he was delighted that it offered everything he was looking for. “The greatest benefits have been easy file level restoration, replication for disaster recovery to our Atlanta office, and TCO. I no longer have to worry about job failure on a nightly basis, or weed through Backup Exec logs to discover what caused the job to fail every night. There’s no more constant reinstallation of backup agents on the servers, and best of all, no more changing and cataloging of tapes. Dell AppAssure was easy to install and to get going, and the console is easy to read. If something were to happen to me, someone else could easily know how to run the backups. I’ve gone from dreading when someone said they lost an email or file, to a situation where I’m backing up everything once an hour. In 10 minutes or less, I can get that email or file back up.”

Dell AppAssure has changed Poole’s day-to-day work experience in dramatic ways, as he no longer has to change tapes twice a week, catalog, and test failed backups. Dell AppAssure is saving time, money, and headaches for Poole and the company. Outlining the Before Dell AppAssure/After Dell AppAssure scenarios, Poole says:

Before Dell AppAssure
“We had to decide what was most critical for each night because of tape limitations. The most we could get of our data was 1.4 TB on two tapes. The cost of tape was getting higher and we couldn’t back up everything we wanted.”

With Dell AppAssure
“I bought four very inexpensive mini SANs and used one in Massachusetts and one in Georgia. I’m doing backup of up to 4TB with Dell AppAssure’s compression, and already getting 10x more data than before. I’m using only 2TB even though we can now back up all the non-critical data as well. Not only that, we now have a BDR plan in place with our office in Atlanta, where I replicate data throughout the day. We’re using Dell AppAssure in virtual standby for Exchange and SQL servers for seamless disaster recovery.”

Results

The results that Linkage is seeing in numerous areas makes Poole look good in terms of key business continuity and cost savings areas:

1. Storage Space Savings: “The storage limitations of our old tape method forced us to choose only the most critical files, folders, and servers for backup each night,” says Poole. “This forced us to take our chances with non-critical but important data. Dell AppAssure’s outstanding compression and deduplication process—saving us about 10-40% on average—has allowed us to heavily increase the amount of data we back up each night, ensuring peace of mind to the company that all of our critical and important data are being backed up and replicated.”
2. Time (RTO/RPT): “On a recent test run, I was able to restore a single Exchange mail message in under 10 minutes,” says Poole, happily.
3. Return on Investment:
   

Poole says he was very surprised with the actual savings that Dell AppAssure provided. “I was especially impressed by how much Dell AppAssure is saving for us in operational investment,” says Poole. “That’s essentially what I paid for the software. I was able to get rid of the annual $1,600 tape drive maintenance contract, the yearly Symantec contract of $1,500, and the $3,000 server contract – all on products that weren’t working well. To have an ROI like this with Dell AppAssure and to grow it – well, these are the kinds of numbers the CFO dreams about at night.”

“Dell AppAssure just makes sense for any organization,” says Poole. “To be able to obtain a product that can provide backup, deduplication, compression, high availability, and disaster recovery services in one box at a reasonable price is an easy decision to make. Not only that, but I’m a big stickler for responsive, solution-based, customer service. I’ve stopped doing business with companies who don’t have good customer support, because once you’ve got a good product, it all comes down to how good a company is on the back-end. Dell AppAssure has come through with flying colors and frankly, has made me look like a rock star.”

About Linkage

Headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts with operations in Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, and worldwide, Linkage is a global organizational development company that specializes in leadership development. With integrated solutions that include strategic consulting services, customized leadership development and training experiences, tailored assessment services, executive coaching, and benchmark research, Linkage has worked with more than 200,000 leaders and managers in programs worldwide since 1988.