Leading auto retailer Arnold Clark selects Cohesity and Cisco for backup, restore, and ransomware protection

The Arnold Clark organisation is the largest, independent, multi-franchise automobile Company in Europe and the largest private limited Company in Scotland irrespective of trade/ industry and has an annual turnover of £4.5bn.

Founded in 1954 under the direction of Sir Arnold Clark, the Company provides the complete range of vehicle sales and aftersales services, operates over 200 dealerships in the UK and employs more than 11,000 members of staff.

The Challenge

As a distributed and diversified business, Arnold Clark has complex data management requirements. Its branches and business lines require immediate access to information, state-of-the-art record keeping and excellent backup and disaster recovery. Service interruptions can have catastrophic effects, resulting in immediate loss of revenue and reputational damage.

Responsibility for ensuring constant uptime and 100 percent reliable backup, restore, and disaster recovery falls to Pat Malloy, Head of Networks and Platform Engineering. Pat inherited a five year-old solution built on what was, at that time, a very modern platform using converged infrastructure to deliver compute and storage for production workloads and backup and disaster recovery services.

Over time, the existing solution became more complex to manage with large operational overheads required to keep it running. It was difficult to scale, and as the business had grown significantly since its deployment, the solution was reaching its limitations. Some of the pressing problems were: backup windows were not quick enough to ingest all data, separate backup and replication jobs were required for disaster recovery, and low capacity efficiency was resulting in high cost, while storage limitations made it impossible to create data archives. In addition, critical SQL workloads were not adequately being backed up, and archiving tapes offsite was both expensive and arduous, making data recovery time consuming and costly.

The Solution

When the company was ready to proceed, Malloy approached Cohesity with the primary goal of replacing the legacy backup solution. He evaluated three vendors, but only took Cohesity through to the Proof of Concept (PoC). He was particularly attracted by the way Cohesity and Cisco were partnering to offer a flexible and comprehensive solution backed by Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs)—and within that, Cisco HyperFlex was a huge draw.

Moving to a hyperconverged model would be a complete architectural change for Arnold Clark, but the company was drawn to its ability to allow for incremental, non-disruptive scaling over time, so that relatively small-scale investment can be made as the business grows and changes. Moreover, getting this capability from the Cohesity-Cisco solution came in far more cost-effective than its nearest competitor. Both the initial outlay and manageable ongoing investment costs were a key factor in bringing the Arnold Clark Board in line with the Cohesity-Cisco solution.

Ransomware protection was another central consideration. Having conducted internal exercises, Arnold Clark was aware that it had insufficient protection against ransomware attacks, which needed to be addressed. The Cohesity-Cisco solution has an immutable file system ensuring backup protection against ransomware attacks and also provides data encryption both when data is in transit and at rest. On this, Malloy said “It ticks all the boxes.”

Arnold Clark was already using Cisco infrastructure, such as Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Cisco Intersight, which made the implementation familiar and easier on one unified, programmable architecture. Malloy said “A big attraction is that Cohesity is a certified technology partner of Cisco so we had the reassurance that it works and is simple to adopt.”

The Cohesity-Cisco solution provides Arnold Clark with a simplified, modern backup and recovery solution. Cohesity software on Cisco UCS is used for backup and data protection across core, edge, and cloud. This provides consistent capabilities and enables easy movement of replicated data across locations and clouds natively.

With complete visibility, the Cohesity Helios multicloud data platform creates a simple way to update and manage data backup across all of Arnold Clark’s sites and environments. In addition, Cisco Intersight provides full cloud-powered life-cycle-management of Cohesity-certified Cisco UCS nodes along with an integrated support experience through the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC).

The Results

Certified with CVDs and backed by Cisco support, the joint Cohesity-Cisco solution delivers proven business value while natively integrating with Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco Intersight. The solution has overcome the many difficulties Arnold Clark had with its legacy system, and it can grow and flex to mirror changes in the business. Malloy has achieved a paradigm shift in terms of investment in IT infrastructure, replacing the need to make significant investments every few years with budgeted, smaller-scale investments that will keep the solution on track to meet dynamic business needs. Malloy has won favour with the Board for taking this measured approach to future scoping and capacity planning, as well as budgeting. Going forward, Arnold Clark is working on utilising Cohesity on Cisco UCS for integrated file shares and data repositories with sensitive information.

Key Benefits

• Simplified and streamlined IT processes. Hundreds of backup jobs are now reduced to five policies.
• Significant time and cost savings. Saved three hours a week creating capacity and deleting failed jobs. Six to seven hour restore period is reduced to around an hour.
• Superior capacity. 600 TB of data in backup on 200 TB of physical storage resulting in a 2.7x reduction.
• Encrypted backup and ransomware protection.