Challenge
- Expensive and resource-intensive to restore data or add new solutions due to a mix of legacy backup products and storage hardware
- Complicated and time-consuming to manage different vendors and daily backup operations
Solution
- Deployed two Commvault HyperScale Appliances 3300 and two Commvault Hyperscale Appliances 1300 across data centers in Auckland and Hamilton
- Commvault Professional Services assisted with design and data migration throughout the implementation
Result
- 30 man-hour-per-week reduction in back-up operations
- NZ$2.5 million in projected OPEX savings over three years with modernized backup infrastructure
- Moved large volumes of data from production sites to disaster recovery sites nine times faster
- Simplified vendor management by consolidating multiple backup solutions and eliminating the need to purchase servers, storage and licenses separately
- Enabled each team (Linux, Database and Hypervisor) to monitor their own backup performance instead of relying on designated staff member
- Gained a more sustainable data center environment by cutting floor space and energy consumption
Saving NZ$2.5 Million OPEX over three years
As New Zealand’s largest telecommunication and digital services company, Spark New Zealand (Spark) focuses on helping its customers grow and on making a significant and positive impact across the country. Driven by the goals of becoming the country’s most loved digital brand and of being recognized as a sustainability leader in the industry, Spark wanted to refresh its backup architecture, ensure data availability and reduce operating costs and resource consumption.
Spark was running a mix of grandfathered systems and applications, such as IBM AIX 2 and 3 as well as Oracle Database 6, 7, and 8. The company also used multiple legacy backup solutions, including IBM TSM, Oracle RMAN, HPE StoreOnce and other native solutions. Running each restore or adding new solutions to the backup environment was both expensive and time-consuming.
“We had a lot of bespoke solutions, and it was a real nightmare to allocate resources across them. The overhead was also too much. The renewal for TSM alone was approximately NZ$500,000, whereas the whole Commvault infrastructure renewal was just NZ$200,000,” said Prasheel Singh, Chapter Lead, Data Storage and Retrieval, Network and IT Infrastructure. “The biggest reason we selected Commvault was cost efficiency. By modernizing our backup infrastructure with Commvault HyperScale Appliances, we now have a single OPEX and expect to save NZ$2.5million over three years.
“We can also do intelligent backups and multiple operating systems backups, which we could not do with other products.”
“The greatest benefits to consolidating our backup solutions into Commvault are simplicity and vendor management. All we had to do was purchase one appliance instead of getting servers, storage and licenses separately. I no longer need to deal with multiple vendors. I just work with Commvault and my backup infrastructure.”
Prasheel Singh Chapter Lead, Data Storage and Retrieval, Network and IT Infrastructure
Slashed 30 man-hours per week in backup operations
Spark’s multiple legacy backup solutions and storage hardware were not compatible to each other, which made it extremely challenging to manage backup operations. For example, StoreOnce could do backups for older Oracle workloads but not SQL, TSM or newer Oracle versions. The system also lacked visibility to monitor backup status in TSM. That complexity meant it took a full day to run through 4,000-plus servers and different systems to discover issues.
With Commvault Command CenterTM web console, each team (Linux, Database and Hypervisor) can monitor their own backup performance, observing how many backup jobs ran successfully and which ones failed, without relying on a designated backup team. This enabled Spark to slash 30 man-hours per week in backup operations.
“In the past, moving large volumes of data from production sites to disaster recovery (DR) sites took 1.5 days. With the scale-out architecture of Commvault HyperScale Appliance, the data is available in our DR sites within four hours,” Singh said.
Achieving sustainability goals with a single vendor management approach
With a single Commvault backup environment, Spark moved closer to becoming a sustainable leader by cutting data center floor space and power consumption, and by recycling hardware—without incurring additional costs.
“The greatest benefits to consolidating our backup solutions into Commvault are simplicity and vendor management. All we had to do was purchase one appliance instead of getting servers, storage and licenses separately. I no longer need to deal with multiple vendors. I just work with Commvault and my backup infrastructure,” said Singh.
Commvault’s add-on features like Live Sync, Live Sync with replication, and VM recoveries also help Spark prevent data loss in the event of ransomware or malware attacks. IT staff can now run transaction logs any time and rapidly restore data with Commvault HyperScale Appliances.
Commvault Professional Services assisted with the design, data migration and fine-tuning of the system, allowing Spark to complete the transition without disrupting normal business operations. “Now, if we need to add a new server or amend an environment, it doesn’t take more than a couple of hours—almost half as long as it used to take,” said Singh. “It’s not just that the Commvault product works—their support is fantastic. Everyone just gets behind us and helps resolve issues quickly.”