LightEdge Replaced NetApp by EMC CLARiiON

EMC Corporation announced that LightEdge Solutions, Inc. is optimizing its managed backup and recovery services with EMC Avamar, the company’s industry-leading deduplication software. LightEdge is a leading provider of hosted communications and IT services to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

"As our business expanded, our legacy backup and recovery solution lacked the scalability and features to support a larger, more sophisticated customer base," said Jim Masterson, LightEdge’s Chairman and CEO. "Licensing costs and growing backup volumes also made it more challenging to offer the service at a competitive price."

Based in Des Moines, Iowa, LightEdge replaced its 58-terabyte NetApp storage environment with a single EMC CLARiiON CX4 networked storage system to store the company’s application data, including Microsoft Exchange Server email and Microsoft SQL Server databases. After evaluating CommVault and other data protection solutions, LightEdge also replaced its Syncsort and NetApp backup system with EMC Avamar to enable customers to back up and restore emails, databases, documents, check images and other data, as well as back up its own production data. With advance data deduplication capabilities, Avamar automatically identifies and removes redundant data from the backup process before sending it over an IP network to Avamar Data Stores at multiple LightEdge’s datacenters across the U.S.

"By removing redundant data, we’ve cut our costs of delivering managed backup and recovery services, which allows us to offer a more competitively priced product," said Jeff Springborn, LightEdge’s President and COO. "Some of our customers with large backup volumes and limited network bandwidth can now complete their backups within their scheduled windows. Not only do we solve an important problem for them, but we have broadened the potential market we can address in a burgeoning market for these services."

As the migration is underway, LightEdge has been able to compare Avamar side by side with the legacy solution. In one business area, LightEdge recently used Avamar to execute full backups of several hundred servers overnight. Although 4.2 terabytes of data was protected, total amount of data transferred was only 154 gigabytes due to data deduplication. The legacy solution, on the other hand, backed up less than 100 servers in another business area and transferred 3.3 terabytes of data during the same amount of time. When the migration is completed, LightEdge will reduce the amount of data for backups by more than 3 terabytes.

"While SMBs are aggressively cutting costs, they’re still dealing with how to manage the explosion of data," said Masterson. "Our business is accelerating because we provide a solution that does not require a large investment — something many SMBs want to avoid, even in a better business climate. Not only are our customers gaining higher-quality data protection with Avamar, but they’re actually saving money by increasing the efficiency of their backups."

"With faster, smaller backups, there is less strain on our production systems, which helps us slow acquisition of new storage," said Springborn. "Avamar’s functionality also has made our backup and restoration process more automated and reliable. Besides its ease-of-use, Avamar cost us roughly one-fifth of our legacy system and we expect to have a return on investment in a year. By passing these savings to our customers, we have made our backup and recovery offerings much more cost-competitive to our target market."

"EMC has been a true partner with us to bring this service to market," said Masterson. "We’ve been very impressed with the high quality of EMC’s technology and its ability to bring backup efficiency to our hosted applications and customer platforms. Additionally, the EMC team’s commitment to making our relationship as productive and effective as possible has been instrumental. With EMC, we’re able to offer truly innovative, enterprise-class hosted services to our SMB customers previously would have been out of their reach."

"LightEdge is a great example of how a company can leverage cutting-edge technologies not only for their own business, but for its customers as well," said Rob Emsley, Senior Director of Storage Software Product Marketing, EMC Corporation. "As data protection requirements continue to rise, LightEdge is giving SMBs a cost-effective and efficient way to backup their critical data, without carrying the burden of a physical footprint. We’re pleased to work with LightEdge and look forward to helping them maximize their business as their needs continue to grow in the future."