AutoNation Leverages Cohesity beyond Modern Backup and Recovery

Challenges

AutoNation has a large IT environment with a primary datacenter in Denver, Colorado and a secondary disaster recovery 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 Disaster Recovery (DR) site refresh on the horizon, Adam Rasner, Head of IT and 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 hyperconverged solutions, with the following requirements:

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

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, hyperconverged secondary 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-premises 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 across a hybrid environment was instrumental.

The team deployed Cohesity C2510 nodes 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 storage 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’s software-defined hyperconverged platform for modern backup and recovery, we substantially enhanced our operational capabilities at AutoNation, improved reliability, and lowered our TCO. Beyond backup and recovery, we are extending the Cohesity solution for disaster recovery and long-term retention in AWS. A key benefit with Cohesity was the ability for native integration with AWS, giving us the flexibility and scalability we need for future demands.

— Adam Rasner, Vice President Technology Operations, AutoNation