European Entertainment Company Sky Improving Storage Efficiencies With Veritas

Since partnering with Veritas Technologies LLC, Sky UK Limited has increased efficiency and freed staff time to focus on IT transformation projects using NetBackup, NetBackup Appliances and Information Map.

To help other customers achieve similar success, Veritas has announced that it is offering a free trial of the Information Map for qualifying NetBackup customers.

Sky is an European entertainment company that relies on technology to provide a broad range of content to its 22 million users. To improve service delivery, Sky prioritised visibility into its company data and being able to backup and recover business-critical information. However, the reliance on some legacy tape-based backup systems resulted in IT scaling issues and staff inefficiencies.

Through the NetBackup Converged Platform, Sky is able to protect its information, and at the same time, identify opportunities throughout its environment to optimise information storage and reduce risk in 24 hours.

The NetBackup Converged Platform delivers agility and increases efficiency by providing an integrated solution for data protection, recovery and insight into unstructured data. This enables Sky to make better decisions on what data is valuable for the business. NetBackup Appliances integrates with its existing NetBackup, providing a turnkey solution for backup, storage, and deduplication. Veritas Information Map also integrates with NetBackup to provide a visual experience for the IT team to gain insight into the organization’s unstructured data.

“We want to build a business that is durable for the long term,” said David Kerr, storage backup and support manager, Sky UK and Ireland. “For the IT department, it means ensuring that our technology infrastructure supports and enables the company for the future. Veritas has been an excellent partner in enabling that vision. Today, we throw a massive workload at the appliances and Veritas NetBackup always provides stability. The backup success rate has increased to 98% from a past average of 85%, while the backup workload has expanded to 55,000 jobs, an increase of 10,000 in the last 12 months.“

NetBackup Appliances enable easier and more efficient analysis, which led to improvements of Sky processes. Before using the solution, Sky spent many staff hours managing tapes. That time has been reduced enabling the team to focus on more strategic IT transformation projects. The business has also benefitted from having instant restore and recover capability, whilst the backup team saves time using NetBackup OpsCenter to report on capacity, and summarize backup status via automated email messages. Sky’s IT team members are super-users, after implementing 34 Veritas NetBackup Appliances. As early adopters, the team can also see how the integrated appliance technology has matured.

With NetBackup, Sky was able to take advantage of Veritas Information Map to better improve visibility and understand the nature of their data environment. Based on the metadata collected directly from NetBackup, it can identify areas of risk, areas of value and areas of waste. In addition, it used the insights derived from Information Map to help develop retention policies, and was able to drive down the use of tapes.

“Information Map gave us a fantastic, graphical view of our file system backups,” added Kerr. “Our unstructured data could be accessed by age and business relevance, and we’re able to make informed decisions regarding how we store our data and have been able to save on storage and backup resources.”

“The platform capabilities of NetBackup to integrate with Information Map represents a new way to approach protecting information, where visibility into the actual nature of the data can immediately improve efficiencies,” said Peter Grimmond, head of technology for EMEA, Veritas. “Just as Sky has experienced, we believe this opportunity exists for all of our NetBackup customers and we are encouraging them to take advantage.“

Veritas NetBackup version 7.7.3 is available, introducing faster cloud backups, increased operational efficiencies, and support for the latest workload and storage technologies. Cloud backups leverage compression technology, improving performance and storage efficiency. Activity monitoring and software deployment has been streamlined, and VMware tags can be protected and integrated into your data protection strategy. And with NetBackup Self Service, applications can be individually protected and recovered alongside standard file and folder backups.

For current NetBackup customers on version 7.5 or higher and NetBackup Appliance customers on version 2.5 or higher, Veritas is offering a free trial of the Information Map.