AutoNation Accelerates Its Backups with Cohesity

Challenges

AutoNation has a large IT environment with a primary data center in Denver, CO and a secondary disaster recovery (DR) site in Plano, TX. It has over 1300 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:

• IT team was spending 50% to 60% of one FTE babysitting frequent job failures.
• Not all applications were supported and protected.
• Storage appliances did not scale, which resulted in expensive forklift upgrades.
• Ongoing costs were getting out of control.

With a DR site refresh on the horizon, Adam Rasner, Vice President Technology Operations, challenged his team to come up with a solution that would address infrastructure issues and eliminate expensive forklift upgrades. The team began looking at available options while applying the following requirements:

• Easy-to-install, configure, and manage
• Web-scale architecture
• Predictable cost

Solution

The AutoNation IT team evaluated multiple solutions, including Cohesity and Rubrik. After an extensive proof-of-concept (PoC), the team selected Cohesity to be AutoNation’s next-generation, software-defined data protection solution.

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.
The team deployed Cohesity C2510 across AutoNation’s environment, and consolidated data protection, target storage, and SQL protection on a single platform. With Cohesity’s scale-out, pay-as-you-grow model, the IT team could easily introduce new nodes into the Cohesity cluster and address growing requirements.

Our goal was to build a highly efficient and agile IT infrastructure that quickly adapts to evolving business requirements. By leveraging Cohesity, a software-defined, hyperconverged platform for data protection and target storage, we substantially enhanced our operational capabilities, reliability and lowered our TCO.

— Adam Rasner, Vice President Technology Operations, AutoNation