Transcript
Case study
EFIF saves over 50 per cent in backup costs HP StoreOnce reduces data restore times from two days to two minutes for Danish educational IT provider Industry IT service provision Objective Provide a robust, cost-effective and scalable backup service for Danish educational establishments Approach Considered disk-based backup software on the market and based their decision on past experience with HP combined with trust in its ability to deliver a robust solution IT matters • Uses deduplication to reduce backup data volumes to one twentieth the amount required by tape and other non deduplicating solutions, with the equivalent reduction in backup times • Reduces restore times from two days to two minutes • Provides a scalable solution that can cope with increasing demands for capacity and performance Business matters • Saves over 50 per cent in personnel costs for backup • Avoids having to hire another full time equivalent employee • Improves the quality of service delivered to educational customers
“Our new disk-based HP backup environment frees up time, saves cost and increases the quality of our IT services. It has plenty of room to grow in both capacity and performance and we save 50 per cent in personnel costs for backup. The HP solution simply takes care of itself.” – Thomas Friis Poulsen, IT manager, EFIF
Danish education sector benefits from trustworthy backup EFIF provides IT services for 17 educational institutions in Denmark, including Aarhus Business College. Data security is important to the schools and colleges and they rely on EFIF to provide efficient backup. To achieve this, it runs HP StoreOnce backup solutions which reduce costs, boost restore times and provides vital scalability.
Case study | EFIF
50 per cent reduction in backup costs
Challenge
Solution
Inefficient backup Based in Risskof, Denmark, EFIF provides shared IT services for 17 educational institutions across the country. Its aim is to ensure efficient IT delivery for more than 100,000 users, from stable and fast internet connections, antivirus and administration to backup and restore IT procurement and strategy.
Deduplication technology Working with Indes A/S and HP, EFIF optimised its entire backup environment by switching to a disk-based system.
One of EFIF’s major customers is Aarhus Business College (ABC). Founded in 1856, it is the oldest business college in Denmark and one of the largest with 300 full-time equivalent staff and approximately 10,000 students. Data security is of paramount importance for schools and colleges. For many years, EFIF used a tape-based backup system with four tape drives but the logistics were so demanding that it required one full-time employee. Daily backups congested the infrastructure, affecting restore times and damaging EFIF’s service to its members. Another major problem was that the system restrictions meant that EFIF had to run backup jobs in a way that suited their system and not in a convenient way for their members. “The situation was obviously not satisfactory,” says IT manager of EFIF, Thomas Poulsen. “So, when IT consultancy Indes and HP proposed a new way of doing things, we listened with interest.”
The move was taken in two steps. Firstly, it implemented the smaller HP StoreOnce D2D 4300 Backup system and it then moved up to a 96TB HP StoreOnce B6200 system. Critical audit data that needs to be kept for many years is still stored on tape. Using leading deduplication technologies, HP StoreOnce backup solutions reduce the amount of data that needs to be saved, shrinking backup windows. The backup solutions are covered by a five-year HP Proactive Care support contract and EFIF uses them in conjunction with backup and recovery automation software, HP Data Protector. The organisation’s Storage Area Network (SAN) solution is an HP LeftHand StoreVirtual P4000 system. HP Proactive Care service is designed specifically to support the business environment, bringing together a superior call experience with end to end call management, advanced technical expertise for problem prevention, rapid problem awareness and notification with expedited resolution. Integrating both proactive and reactive elements means that customers get superior value out of their IT investments.
Benefits
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Case study | EFIF
Customer solution at a glance Application Data backup Software • HP StoreOnce D2D 4300 Backup solution • HP StoreOnce B6200 Backup (96TB) • HP Data Protector HP services • Five-year HP Proactive Care
Cost saving Backup is now much quicker and easier to manage, and increased automation means that it also costs less.
The scalability of EFIF’s HP B6200 system is another plus point which is enabling it to cope with a data explosion caused by an increasing number of members.
“We save over 50 per cent in the personnel costs associated with backup, or the equivalent of one fifth of a full time equivalent employee, and this means that we have avoided having to employ another person to cope with the increasing workload,” says Poulsen. “The free time gained by moving from tape to disk has been used to increase the quality of our other IT services and we can feel the benefit.
“We can multiply both capacity and performance which prevents our overall backup window increasing even when we expand the solution,” adds Poulsen.
“Financially, the deduplication functionality of HP StoreOnce delivers great value. It means that we only need to invest in a smaller solution because we save one twentieth the amount of data. The service agreement we have with HP also makes backup costs predictable and transparent.”
Time saved by deduplication has also injected valuable flexibility into the operation. Reducing individual backup windows and eliminating queuing for the tape units means backup can be done when members require it and not when the system allows. The time taken to restore data has also been dramatically improved, as Poulsen explains: “today it takes two minutes instead of up to two days to restore a file because our tape drives are no longer taken up with days of backup. Restore speeds are four to five times quicker.”
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Case study | EFIF
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© Copyright 2013 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
4AA4-9402EEW, November 2013
