AutoNation Leverages Cohesity Beyond Backup and Recovery for Scale-Out NAS

Challenges

AutoNation has a large IT environment with a primary data center in Denver, Colorado and secondary disaster recovery (DR) site in Plano, Texas. The company has over 1,300 virtual machines, 200 physical servers, and growing data of 1.2PB that supports retail operations.

Due to the company’s legacy data protection environment, the IT team at AutoNation was experiencing a host of issues, including up to 6,000 backup failures per month requiring a dedicated employee with more than 70 percent time to address constant challenges. Not all applications were supported or protected, and existing storage appliances did not scale, which resulted in expensive forklift upgrades. Backup and recovery costs were growing exponentially and the company needed a scalable solution for modern backup and recovery. In addition, with increased application development in AWS, AutoNation required a hybrid solution with seamless integration.

With a DR site refresh on the horizon, Adam Rasner, Vice President of Technology Operations, challenged his team to come up with a backup and recovery solution to address infrastructure issues and reduce cost. The team began looking at available options, including hyper-converged solutions, with the following requirements:

• Web-scale architecture with a predictable cost model
• Ability to protect, store, and manage data with a next-gen solution
• Capabilities beyond modern backup and recovery, including scale-out NAS
• Single pane of glass with a hybrid, multi-cloud approach

Solution

The AutoNation IT team evaluated multiple solutions, including Cohesity, Rubrik, and Veritas. After an extensive proof-of-concept (PoC), the team selected Cohesity to be AutoNation’s next-generation, hyper-converged data platform based on performance, ease of implementation and management, and lower TCO.

Out of the box, Cohesity offered a single, easy-to-navigate user interface (UI). In fact, during the PoC stage, the team immediately witnessed a substantial decline in the job-failure rate, and any failures that did occur were easily traced and addressed. Moreover, the team was able to take corrective actions to ensure that failures wouldn’t repeat, which previously was not an option.

It was key and critical for AutoNation and its go-forward strategy to implement Cohesity to integrate across all environments, including moving data from on-prem to multi-cloud and back to on-prem. With more and more next-generation apps now developed in the cloud, AutoNation will rely more heavily on cloud storage, including AWS. Cohesity’s ability to support backup and recovery, as well as other use cases like scale-out NAS across a hybrid environment were instrumental.

“Storing multiple terabytes of document management files, SQL logs, and various unstructured data under the same Cohesity UI was a natural choice for us,” Rasner said. “This was key to consolidation of data across our operations.”

Our goal was to build a highly efficient and agile IT infrastructure that quickly adapts to evolving business requirements. By leveraging Cohesity’s software-defined hyperconverged platform for data management, we substantially enhanced our operational capabilities at AutoNation, improved reliability, and lowered our TCO. Beyond data protection, we are extending the Cohesity solution for scale-out NAS, and long-term retention in AWS. A key benefit with a flexible and scalable platform like Cohesity was the ability to expand use cases across our environment beyond data protection meet our evolving business requirements.”

— Adam Rasner, Vice President Technology Operations, AutoNation