Challenges
When IT Operations Manager Michael Lawrence joined Vita Group three years ago, he was immediately concerned with the company’s backup and recovery process. It wasn’t broken, but it was also ‘far from ideal’, relying on what he saw as an overly complex architecture for the organization’s needs.
Vita Group used Commvault for backups to an EMC Isilon primary storage array before being aged out to tape. The storage platform ran across two physical data centers set up in an active-active configuration, and contained more ‘moving parts’ than Lawrence believed necessary. The complexity meant Vita Group needed a dedicated backup administrator with in-depth knowledge of Commvault to drive backup and recovery. Still, Vita Group ran up against limitations.
For example, there was a hard limit on the number of items that the indexing node could serve, requiring a substantial investment in further infrastructure to resolve. The index contained metadata that Commvault needs to be able to locate and perform operations on the data that it backs up. Vita Group found that older files would simply drop from the index, unless excessive disk space was provided, making them much harder to locate and recover. Vita Group wanted to simplify the backup process and reduce the time it took.
Additionally, Vita Group’s infrastructure needs are changing. The company is using more SaaS, and this is primarily responsible for the growth in storage and backup requirements for applications such as SharePoint and Office 365. It is also starting to use Azure for secondary storage of its backups. “My intent is to tear down the second active data center when that comes to its end of life, and use Azure as a disaster recovery site,” Lawrence said.
Vita Group aimed for the following capabilities in its next data protection solution:
- Simplified management and intuitive platform
- Reduce backup and recovery times across entire infrastructure
- Identify hyperconverged solution compatible with cloud integration
- Flexible and cost-effective solution to meet future requirements