Cegedel Leverages FalconStor VTL and De-Dupe

FalconStor Software, Inc. announced that Cegedel (Compagnie Grand-Ducale d’Électricité du Luxembourg), an energy provider in Luxembourg, has implemented the FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solution with data deduplication to reduce energy utilization, and for data protection of its VMware environment and virtualized servers.

After analysing networking processes, Cegedel concluded that LAN usage was one of their main targets for improvement. In addition, Cegedel wanted to live up to the ambition of a greener IT environment, in line with the company’s strategy of reducing carbon footprint and supporting renewable energy. Having 392 terabytes of data, of which 10 terabytes are to be stored, the company decided it needed to redesign its backup processes, and strive for a LAN-free backup. Cegedel put a server virtualization strategy in place using VMware Infrastructure, and redesigned storage and backup processes with FalconStor solutions.

“We maintain two sites, including a disaster recovery remote site, with exactly the same configuration. Both have a proxy server, a backup server, and FalconStor VTL with integrated deduplication,” said Veronica Anllo, IT Administrator at Cegedel. “We have virtualized our servers, tapes and disks, to reduce traffic on the LAN. FalconStor VTL with deduplication is the ideal solution for data protection of our VMware-virtualized servers.”

An advantage of Cegedel’s new storage architecture is much higher performance. In the recent past, the company’s backup continued during the day; now backup is performed during the night. Today, Cegedel backs up 6 terabytes in full system backups. After nightly backups to the FalconStor VTL, data is still written to physical tape through the FalconStor VTL’s integration with the physical tape library. FalconStor VTL allows the company to have an almost unlimited number of tape drives without additional investment in hardware. It also allows the company to add more libraries without further investment in software.

Cegedel reached the goals that were set at the start of the project – having backup data redundant in two locations, while reducing the network bandwidth used for the backup solution through the use of FalconStor VTL and data deduplication. Only new, unique blocks are copied to the disaster recovery site, even with Cegedel’s policies of full backups all of the time. Cegedel is receiving a deduplication ratio on average of more than 36 to 1, for reduction on data sent over to the DR site.

“Consolidation and virtualization are key energy-saving technologies because they enable data center administrators to accomplish more tasks using less energy," said Guillaume Imberti, FalconStor vice president and general manager, EMEA operations. “Cegedel is an innovative energy company leveraging FalconStor technology to enjoy a huge amount of energy savings from using less spinning disk for nearline storage. They are savouring the green benefits from FalconStor VTL with data deduplication, resulting in space savings and IT efficiency.”