Cemex Leverages EMC Avamar De-Dupe

EMC Corporation announced that CEMEX, a building materials company, has turned to EMC to improve its backup and data protection operations in Latin American countries by leveraging EMC Global Services and EMC Avamar deduplication backup software. As a result, CEMEX has been able to consolidate and centralize the backup of its VMware and physical environments in multiple countries back to its Global Data Center in Monterey, Mexico.

As a leading, global provider of cement, ready-mix concrete and related building materials in more than 50 countries, CEMEX required a backup infrastructure that complemented its innovative building industry solutions and efficiency initiatives that promote a sustainable future. With VMware as a critical component within its infrastructure, the company first looked to EMC to better manage and control its virtual backup environment.

Fulgencio Garza, CEMEX’s Global Shared Service Manager, said: "Our VMware farm is composed of 15 ESX servers, running more than 200 virtual machines. While we have definitely achieved a number of benefits by consolidating our servers into a virtual environment – like saving space, cooling and energy and licensing – we found that we were having challenges meeting backup windows due to the limitations of LAN and SAN bandwidth, as well as the performance impact on other applications."

CEMEX’s Global Shared Services Team staff and the EMC Global Services team worked together to assess the environment, design the appropriate solution based on the unique use case and generate guidance on how to perform backups. In addition to reviewing CEMEX backup processes in its VMware and remote office environment, EMC was able to point out that the company could optimize all the processes in its entire backup infrastructure – both virtual and physical in its data center and remote offices.

Garza added: "The trio of people, process and technology was becoming an ever increasing challenge to meet our data protection requirements. We have a lot of remote locations that need to have a dedicated person perform backups, and by doing an analysis, we found that we invest a lot of time to manage the backups – between managing the backups themselves and the tapes in every remote location — totaling more than 4,000 cartridges a year."

Working with EMC Global Services, CEMEX deployed Avamar to deduplicate and backup data in both its virtual and physical environments across 59 sites in 9 different countries. Now, CEMEX has a consolidated backup solution leveraging its own wide area network without additional bandwidth investments, giving it the ability to perform deduplication of flat files and Microsoft SQL Server files in locations in Mexico, Central and South America and then backing up directly to Monterey, Mexico.

With Avamar, CEMEX was able to centralize and consolidate the backup process from a single location, reducing the amount of data by up to 100 to 1 in some locations. In the company’s Global Data Center, CEMEX has been able to dramatically cut the amount of time it has taken to back up data in their virtual environments – going from tens of hours to literally minutes.

Today, CEMEX no longer has the need to invest in more tapes, devices, backup servers and the time and consumption to administer backup in remote locations. Due to consolidating its infrastructure and centrally managing the process via Avamar, CEMEX has shifted a number of dedicated storage administrators off remote backup operations to concentrate on other IT projects.

"At the end of the day, EMC has been able to help us with people, process and, finally, technology, ultimately reducing our total cost of ownership," Garza said. "With people, we’ve been able to reduce the headcount of the people facilitating backups in our data center and multiple remote offices. With process, we now have a standardized architecture that allows us to grow while keeping the same process to centrally manage and backup our data. Finally, we’ve been able to leverage EMC Avamar’s deduplicated backup software to reduce our storage footprint and significantly reduce our reliance on tape backup. If you have a requirement to reduce your current backup TCO, Avamar is a great option."

In addition to Avamar, CEMEX also leverages other EMC backup and recovery solutions, including EMC NetWorker to backup and protect its SAP environment and EMC Data Protection Advisor to gather information about both the Avamar and NetWorker backup processes from a single point of control.