NTT Europe Implements Sepaton

Sepaton, Inc. announced that NTT Europe Ltd, the international arm of communications and ICT solutions provider NTT Communications, is implementing the Sepaton S2100-ES2 data protection platform to protect its data and to maintain a high level of service to its customers as it expands throughout Europe.

 

As an ICT service provider, NTT Europe needs to maintain immediate, reliable access to a massive volume of customer data. The company backups more than 200TB of this data nightly - a volume expected to increase exponentially as the company pursues its plan to expand throughout Europe.

The company needed to drive down costs, while also providing the scalability of performance and capacity required to handle this massive growth without jeopardising its service level agreements with its customers.

"In addition to scalability, we wanted a high performance solution that would enable us to restore our customers' data rapidly; back up growing data volumes to safety within tight timeframes; and cut capacity costs through data deduplication," said Adam Lembariti, senior product manager for NTT Europe.

"We did not want the costly sprawl that would result if we had to add a new single-node system every time we need more performance or capacity in our fast-growing organization," said Lembariti. "Sepaton's unique DeltaScale architecture enabled us to buy a system that meets today's needs and to simply add performance or capacity as our needs grow over time."

Performance of a single Sepaton system scales as high as 43.2 TB/hour and capacity scales to 1.6PB (before deduplication).

"Sepaton not only delivers the fastest performance in the industry, its performance is reliable, predictable, and guaranteed - giving us the ability to meet our customers' expectations for service with confidence," said Lembariti. "That's a competitive advantage for us."

The performance promised by competing vendors varies widely depending on data volumes, change rates, deduplication efficiency and a wide range of other factors.

Unique Deduplication Cuts Capacity
without Slowing Performance.
NTT Europe also noted that Sepaton's byte-differential deduplication is a solution that can deduplicate large data volumes without slowing backup or restore performance.

"Inline/hash solutions were much slower and less efficient in reducing capacity than the Sepaton DeltaStor technology," said Alex Moore, director of product engineering, NTT Europe. "With Sepaton, we can restore customer data immediately, without waiting for the "rehydration" needed in inline/hash based solutions."

Moore also cited Sepaton's expertise in NetBackup and support for NetBackup Open Storage (OST) as key factor in the selection, since NTT Europe intends to implement all facets of OST, including Auto Image Replication (A.I.R.), NetBackup Accelerator, and GRT.

"Sepaton's technical staff not only demonstrated an expert understanding of NetBackup and OST, they truly understood our infrastructure, interpreted our challenges accurately, asked the right questions, addressed the most important challenges, and proposed the smartest solutions. Our relationship has been very positive, we have been very impressed with the agility and responsiveness of Sepaton," said Moore.

"With Sepaton, we can create a separate storage pool for each of our customers and use the multitenancy feature to track customer usage for charge-back purposes," said Moore. "With Sepaton, we have a variety of powerful management options open to us that no other solution could provide, which are imperative to a leading Service Provider, such as NTT."

NTT Europe anticipates that the deployment will be completed as planned in six-to-eight months, rolling out initially at the company's London site, and then followed by Germany, Spain and France.

Tim Butchart, Sepaton's VP and GM of EMEA operations said: "We are focused on meeting the specific needs of large enterprise organizations like NTT Europe. As a result, we have an extremely knowledgeable team of specialists who have the experience to act as an extension of NTT Europe to deliver the best possible performance results, and a rapid return on their investment. This is a great example of how our enterprise-focused expertise and technology combine to deliver a superior data protection solution for our customers."

He concluded: "NTT Europe is a great example of a customer that we enjoy a strong partnership with. We share a joint vision and a solid data protection strategy which supports NTT's goals to provide industry leading backup and recovery Services to its growing customer base."