Victaulic Opts for Sepaton DeltaStor

SEPATON, Inc. announced that Victaulic Company, the world’s leading manufacturer of mechanical pipe joining systems, increased its online data retention, made its file restore process faster and easier, and cut its backup time in half using a SEPATON S2100-ES2 virtual tape library (VTL) with DeltaStor software for data deduplication.

“With our backup times approaching 24 hours and our data volumes increasing exponentially, we had outgrown our existing tape system. We had to decide between upgrading our physical tape library, or moving to a disk-based system,” explained Fred Railing, infrastructure manager, Victaulic Company. “We soon concluded that, for a price comparable to tape, the SEPATON VTL would give us both faster performance and a smaller backup window. The deduplication option would also save us money over time by letting us store much more data on less disk.”

The Evaluation and Selection
Victaulic identified several key considerations for selecting a VTL with deduplication software. The system had to be easy to use and work without changes to existing policies and routines. Because they expected their data growth to continue unabated, Victaulic needed to ensure that they could easily add capacity and performance without buying new systems or costly upgrades in hardware and software. Acknowledging the newness of deduplication technology, Victaulic also required a deduplication guarantee to offset risk. Lastly, the system needed to work seamlessly with both their SAN and their Symantec NetBackup software.

Railing said: “SEPATON offers a simple, risk-free approach to data deduplication with a configuration that proved to be ‘plug-and-play.’ With the ContentAware architecture, we can add performance simply by adding more SEPATON replication engine (SRE) nodes and add capacity simply by adding disk shelves. This is an efficient, cost-effective way to grow the system. We maintain six weeks of full backups online using deduplication. Our confidence was further underscored by HP’s selection of SEPATON as its OEM partner. SEPATON was the clear choice for us.”

35:1 Deduplication Ratio and 50% Faster Backups
Victaulic purchased an S2100-ES2 with one SRE node and 30 TB of usable capacity, along with DeltaStor software. The company’s HP SAN environment consists of mostly Windows servers and VMware virtual servers supporting approximately 2,500 employees. The company expected to find DeltaStor particularly beneficial in deduplicating its Lotus Notes, CAD drawings, Oracle and SQL databases.

“The VTL and DeltaStor software were up and running in just a few hours,” Railing said. “We are storing 164 TB of original data from six weeks of full backups online with a deduplication ratio of 35:1. With more data online and immediately available, our overall restore times have dramatically improved. We estimate that the VTL reduced our file-level restore time from hours to minutes by eliminating the need to search multiple tapes. It took my team and me very little time to become familiar with the new system as it looks like any other physical tape library to our backup software.”

Railing also reduced his backup window from 24 hours to 12 hours. “The VTL backs up and deduplicates the data so fast that our full backups are completed in just half the time it used to take to perform only incrementals with our tape system. With DeltaStor’s concurrent deduplication process, there is absolutely no drain on performance.”

Railing also finds DeltaStor’s management console very helpful in monitoring storage growth and budgeting for expansion. For example, the console provides snapshots of Victaulic’s usable disk capacity, disk capacity used, and remaining capacity available. This feature eliminates the need to over-provision capacity. Railing can manage his backups carefully, and add new capacity only as he needs it. He is also better able to manage his storage operations with the system’s “email home” feature that automatically alerts both his team and SEPATON’s technical support group. If it detects that a fan is beginning to fail, for instance, the system alerts SEPATON’s support team to the problem before the failure has happened and notifies Railing that assistance has been requested.

“Already, our investment in SEPATON has been validated many times over and it will pay for itself in a very short period of time,” concluded Railing. “With budgets likely to tighten, I feel reassured knowing our investment in this VTL technology has lowered both our short-term and long-term backup costs.”

“Victaulic’s experience with SEPATON and our DeltaStor software is consistent with the return on investment our enterprise customers achieve time and time again,” said Mike Worhach, president and CEO, SEPATON, Inc. “With an eye toward reliable, scalable and cost-effective data protection, Victaulic has succeeded in ensuring the integrity of its stored data today and for the future.”