Ridgeback Resources cuts data recovery time from hours to minutes

The Challenge

Ridgeback Resources’s reliance on legacy backup technology required specialist knowledge and time to operate. As the IT team right-sized, staff had to be able to perform multiple jobs which meant moving to a faster and simpler data management solution. Ridgeback also hoped a modern solution would improve its disaster recovery (DR) strategy—reducing data loss risk.

“Our previous product was complex and bigger than we needed. We couldn’t justify the spend anymore, and wanted a modern solution that didn’t require a dedicated IT person,” said Ken Watt, Senior Infrastructure Specialist, Ridgeback Resources.

In its search for a new solution that would easily show IT was backing up on a specific schedule, that its backups were viable, and that it could recover if needed, Ridgeback evaluated Cohesity and Rubrik as well as DR software from Zerto.

“We were looking for a set-it-and-forget-it type of platform. We didn’t want to have to go in and check things manually on a daily basis,” said Watt.

The Solution

Since deploying Cohesity, Ridgeback IT no longer has to spend precious time every day checking backups and reviewing backup logs. IT staff simply scan the automated Cohesity daily report for anomalies. And when a data or file recovery request comes in, IT relies on Cohesity’s global search capabilities to speed the previously tedious process. The platform’s automated global indexing of virtual machines (VMs), files, and objects helps IT simply recover a file from a snapshot or head in the right direction to keep digging—without having to drill down into file trees.

“The search capability is fast, and it’s not limited by one silo, for example a database server,” said Watt. “I can enter a search term and Cohesity brings back results from across the entire environment. This is really nice from an audit perspective, and it worked great recently when one of our accountants was looking for a spreadsheet from someone who had left the company.”

Ridgeback’s environment is completely virtualized, allowing IT to plug VMware vCenter source into a system for daily VM backups. The company is also performing SQL and Oracle backups. “With Cohesity, we can do really granular backups and recovery of databases. And because it’s all incremental or log-based, they’re really fast.”

Ridgeback IT uses Cohesity CloudArchive for long-term retention, offloading some data to Microsoft Azure blob storage. IT has plans to do more with cloud, including enabling VM replication to the cloud with Cohesity CloudSpin—which through automation and by eliminating physical systems will improve DR efficiency.

“We use Microsoft 365 with its built-in retention policies, but that isn’t robust backup. We count on Cohesity for robust, reliable backup of our Exchange Online user mailboxes onsite as an additional fail safe so if something happens—like ransomware—we have a way to quickly recover mailboxes, files and sites. The added benefit is we can perform searches within a user’s mailbox and do recoveries directly from Cohesity. We expect to use Cohesity soon to also backup our SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams environments. With corporate data shared across these collaboration platforms, it becomes increasingly critical to be able to retain and restore from our backups,” said Watt.

The Results

Ridgeback is saving time and further backup investment with Cohesity’s modern, simple-to-use data management platform. IT doesn’t have to continually add products to support new data sources into its environment nor run many consoles for different duties. It’s all aggregated into a single dashboard, delivering complete visibility. And with Cohesity already managing its data, IT staff looks forward to being able to get additional insights into it, as well.

Recovery of even a few files using its old solution could take anywhere from four to six hours. Folders would also take a minimum of four to six hours. And a full recovery of a Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) backup, four to five days. Now IT simply mounts a Cohesity snapshot in less than a minute.

The software solution’s reduced data footprint architecture allows the energy provider to not only leverage the underlying storage volumes the previous product used but recover terabytes of disk and avoid costly hardware upgrades for years. “Our cost avoidance is in the tens of thousands of dollars with Cohesity, which factored into our TCO calculation,” Watt said.

Ridgeback set up its PoC environment within an hour, starting with simple backup policies for a few VMs. It now performs block-level change backups every four hours, modifying from 30 MBs to 30 GBs a day on the file system—a stark contrast to the legacy product that performed a monthly 10TB backup. “Our daily growth is small, and in some cases, total usage goes down because of the compression,” said Watt. “That’s making a huge difference in storage for us.”