Roel Construction Implements Data Domain

Data Domain announced that ROEL Construction
has
successfully applied its Data Domain systems to achieve
low cost,
disk-based archiving. The San Diego, CA-based firm, one
of North America’s
largest construction companies, has consolidated both its
backup and
archiving processes using Data Domain systems and is well
on its way to
reaching its stated goal of tape-free data protection.

ROEL Construction initially deployed Data Domain to address
the growth of
its backup data and its increasing dissatisfaction with
its tape-based data
protection environment. With the availability of archival
storage
capabilities from Data Domain, the firm’s IT Director recognized
the
opportunity to significantly cut costs by migrating archival
data from its
SAN (storage area network) to its Data Domain deduplication
storage
systems. In addition to saving over 94% of the space required
to store
24 terabytes of CommVault Galaxy backup data, the firm is
also now saving
75% of the space required to store the archive data. The
archive data is
copied to file shares hosted on the same Data Domain system
that is used
for backups.

"We anticipate the size of our archival data will grow 4-5
times in just
the next two years," says Kevin Fitzpatrick, Director of
Information
Technology for ROEL. "Our corporate policy dictates that
construction
project records, once closed out, need to be maintained
for 10 years for
litigation and reference purposes. Storing this archival
data on our
existing SAN storage would soon become cost prohibitive
and the thought of
storing it on tape for 10 years made all of us uncomfortable.
When we
heard Data Domain could address archives at a cost effective
price point,
it was a perfect fit for us. We’ve been able to recapture
1.5 terabytes of
disk space on our SAN. And, going forward, we won’t have
to use expensive
SAN storage space as our archives grow. The deduplication
we get from our
Data Domain systems extricated us from that linear relationship
between
data growth and disk expense for archives, and our backups
are now fast and
highly reliable. We don’t have to restore files from tape
because we’re
able to keep 4 months of weekly full backups online."

ROEL currently writes both its backups and archives to a
single Data Domain
appliance, then replicates the entire device to a second
Data Domain
appliance in a different building from its main data center,
further
leveraging the deduplication capabilities of the second
system to cost
effectively maintain data integrity. Fitzpatrick plans for
the future
acquisition of a new high-end Data Domain system for the
San Diego
headquarters data center, allowing the existing Data Domain
systems to be
repurposed as replication targets to a remote site 60 miles
away. This
will maintain a full replica of both its backup and archive
data for
disaster recovery purposes. "At that point, we’ll be totally
tape free and
be able to recover backups and archives both locally and
remotely from
disk," adds Fitzpatrick. "My ultimate goal is to eliminate
reliance on
tape entirely. Our Data Domain systems are highly scalable,
and beyond
recapturing disk space from our SAN, the automation level
has already freed
up more than half of one of my technician’s time. We have
an IT team
member who used to spend 20 hours a week on backups, archives
and dealing
with all the tapes. Now she spends about an hour on the
same work."

With the Data Domain OS 4.3 software, customers can deploy
Data Domain
deduplication storage as a storage tier for nearline file
storage, backup,
disaster recovery and long term retention of enterprise
data for reference,
litigation support and regulatory compliance. Data Domain
systems offer
integrated, deduplicated snapshots for extreme efficiency
in point-in-time
versioning, and deduplicated snapshot replication. Data
Domain systems are
compatible with leading backup, archiving and eDiscovery
software products,
delivering data deduplication and compression for any data
written to the
platform, allowing IT administrators to eliminate redundant
data across
many applications at once.

"Consolidation of backup and archival data makes implementing
Data Domain
systems even more cost effective, manageable and easy to
deploy," said Beth
White, VP of marketing for Data Domain. "Data Domain doesn’t
tie up its
deduplication technology in a backup software application,
so we offer
incredible flexibility to customers who want to gain the
benefits of data
deduplication for different nearline applications. ROEL
Construction is
another example of a Data Domain customer who has built
out the original
application scope of its system to address a broader range
of storage
needs."

ROEL Construction

Data Domain