Propak Corporation Chooses Cohesity for Simplified Backup and Recovery

Challenges

As a services and solutions-driven company, Propak creates customized supply chain solutions for individual customers and writes numerous proprietary applications to meet customer requirements. While the company has seen slower growth in physical storage, data in the cloud increased by 10-fold in the last 24 months. All in-house applications are stored to the cloud, and include customized solutions such as inventory management dashboards to track loads, from brokerage all the way down to invoicing.

Propak had recently replaced aging technology, but it turned out to be a poor replacement, with continual failures, and even an upgrade caused the company to miss two weeks of backups. The IT team was replicating 15 servers onto Veeam and wanted to identify a cost-effective solution with management from a single pane of glass.

With greater reliance on the cloud, and a renewal deadline for Veeam, Propak looked to plan ahead for eventual migration to a hyperconverged environment across its infrastructure stack.

Propak needed the following capabilities in a secondary storage solution:

• Good, clean backups with simplified management and administration
• Replace Veeam with single solution for backup and recovery
• Cost-effective platform for both production and disaster recovery environments
• Robust search capabilities for quick retrieval of files and folders

Solution

Propak could no longer rely on IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and additional legacy solutions proved to be cost prohibitive and could not meet the requirement for simplified management. After evaluating both Cohesity and Rubrik, Propak moved forward with a hyperconverged solution from Cohesity that enabled simplified management across the entire secondary data environment. Propak deployed Cohesity C2300 nodes with DataProtect.

With a successful Cohesity deployment, Propak is considering a more complete hyperconverged environment. The ease-of-management Cohesity provides is motivation to leverage a similar environment on the infrastructure for primary data as well.

Propak has a fairly small datacenter and is a majority Cisco environment. While the company has only increased its physical storage footprint by 15 percent in the last four years, it is putting a majority of its spend to cloud resources because of heavy application development for internal and customer-facing activities. Propak manages a significant amount of data on site, and now has visibility into its overall storage environment from a single pane of glass. Cohesity is backing up a Domain Controller and VMware vCenter workloads, and eliminated the need to replace its SAN for disaster recovery.

Like many large enterprises, our organization has data stored in multiple locations and systems, and there is a huge advantage to not only consolidate data infrastructure for better efficiency and control, but also leverage and access data for business value. Cisco and Cohesity both provide essential technology for our business data needs.  Their continued integration with hyperconverged architectures will make it even easier for us to deploy our data infrastructure in a multicloud environment.”

– Erik Butler, Infrastructure Manager