EMC Chosen by Loomis to Eliminate Tape at 67 Sites

EMC Corporation announced that Loomis has completed its deployment of EMC backup solutions to create a new data protection infrastructure across its distributed enterprise.

Loomis replaced its legacy systems by backup and recovery offerings from EMC. By matching the individual requirements for their sixty-seven field offices, corporate data center, disaster recovery site and virtualized data stores to EMC products, Loomis created an optimized solution.

The results included over 99% deduplication on virtual machine backups via Avamar, a 232% performance increase in backup performance from Data Domain and the elimination of tape and tape drives from 67 remote locations.

Houston, Texas-based Loomis is a multi-billion dollar international cash handling company whose U.S. operations include approximately 8,000 employees and a fleet of over 3,000 armored vehicles. Each business day begins a new transactional cycle for Loomis and its customers, with deliveries of cash to ATMs, banks and other sites. Many of Loomis’ financial customers require same-day transaction posting, which can result in financial repercussions for Loomis if IT system issues were to prevent daily transactional closure. In 2009, the company’s IPO spawned additional strategic IT investments, while increasing compliance requirements and spiking data growth rates at the corporate data center. At the same time, its numerous field locations were facing increasing backup and recovery challenges with management of individual tape drives creating exposure, consuming an inordinate amount of employee time and causing protracted data recovery scenarios.

"When we became a public company, we began investing heavily in data mining, business intelligence, and other new applications," said Bill Homes, Director of Infrastructure for Loomis. "With all this new data, we filled up the tape library at our corporate data center in just six months and soon our backup windows were running into production hours. In addition, as we virtualized our server environment, we did not feel we had an effective method for protecting our growing number of virtual machines. It was time for us to bring our backup capabilities into alignment with the rest of our IT systems."

A Phased, Enterprise-wide Deployment
Loomis took a phased approach to the reinvention of its backup infrastructure and processes that began with its field offices, then moved to its corporate data center and disaster recovery site. CA BrightStor ARCserve and Symantec NetBackup backup applications were replaced by EMC Avamar and EMC NetWorker, and tape libraries and tape drives were replaced by Avamar Data Stores and EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems. Network-efficient replication of backups between sites, enabled by data deduplication, replaced ‘tapes n’ trucks’ pickup and delivery services from Iron Mountain.  

Loomis standardized its U.S. field locations on EMC Avamar backup software and systems, which replicate daily full backups from sixty-seven remote locations to a central Avamar Data Store grid at its corporate headquarters. With Avamar deduplication technology, only 800 gigabytes of data has to move across its existing WAN infrastructure nightly, versus the 50 terabytes of remote office data that used to go to tape each night. Avamar was also deployed to provide daily full guest and image backup of a growing VMware vSphere virtual server environment at the corporate data center. Loomis then implemented EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems with EMC NetWorker backup and recovery software to protect its Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and file sharing environments. Finally, all Data Domain and Avamar-based backups are replicated via the existing network to a Loomis disaster recovery site.

Benefits Realized

• Rapid payback: Loomis estimates that Avamar paid for itself in 8 months and is targeting a similar timeframe for payback from its Data Domain systems.
• A backup performance increase of 232% was delivered by Data Domain systems at the corporate data center.  
• Avamar remote location backups completed in one third the time required by legacy systems.
• Loomis has eliminated the need to send 30 backup tapes per week offsite from their corporate headquarters so disaster recovery is now automated and network-based.
• Tape drives and media have been eliminated from 67 remote sites.
• Two full-time backup employee positions eliminated at corporate headquarters, and automated remote backups have eliminated employee performed backup processes at 67 remote sites.
• Virtual machine backups achieved over 99% deduplication, nightly full backups ensured rapid recovery capabilities of virtualized servers.
• Fast recoveries are now achievable for all data across the Loomis enterprise, reducing risk of financial exposure due to interruption of daily transactional cycles while helping meet compliance requirements.

Preempting the Arrival of a Hurricane
Years after Katrina decimated the Louisiana coastal region, the arrival of a hurricane gave Loomis its first real-world opportunity to leverage the capabilities of its Avamar system to ensure its customers experienced service continuity. Rather than reacting to site damage or power outages, storage engineers at Loomis’ corporate headquarters in Houston used Avamar to preemptively backup a Louisiana-based remote office server a few hours before the hurricane made landfall.  

"Then we simply spun up a virtual server at our corporate site, restored the data from New Orleans to it and rerouted transactions to the new server," said Hoang Tran, systems engineering manager for Loomis. "It was easy, fast and everything worked perfectly. There was no interruption of service to our customers when the local power went out."

"EMC helped us reinvent our entire backup infrastructure in such a way that we can scale and move ahead strategically as our needs evolve," said Bill Homes, Director of Infrastructure for Loomis. "We no longer baby sit tapes, and when we get a restore request the user typically has the file before we get off the phone. In terms of management, our branch offices and virtual servers in the data center are now tied together and centrally managed with Avamar. NetWorker helps us manage our Data Domain systems and tape environment. We keep data online with disk for 90 days now, we only go to tape quarterly and we’re transitioning to a tapeless infrastructure. Our disaster recovery processes are now entirely automated. Looking forward, we plan to get all our backup and recovery into a single, unified architecture and manage it from a single-pane."