Tipper Tie Deploys Riverbed Whitewater Cloud Storage Appliances

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced that
Tipper Tie, Inc., a part of Dover Corporation and manufacturer
of food packaging equipment, has deployed its Whitewater cloud storage
appliances for backup in its US and European locations.

A three-year calculation shows that moving to cloud storage for backup with
Whitewater will save Tipper Tie $155,000 dollars in tape backup fees and nearly
$28,000 in man-hours, while still enabling the company to meet its
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act compliance obligations.

Challenges: Inconsistent, time-consuming,
and expensive tape backup
With facilities in North Carolina, Switzerland, and Germany and an IT team of
two, Tipper Tie needed to implement a backup solution that was consistent and
standardized. Although each site used tape backup, the process and equipment
were not consistent and the company desired a different solution to better
document regulatory compliance.

The IT team also had to resolve limitations and mounting expenses associated
with tape backup at the company’s HQs in North Carolina. The five-year-old,
seven-tape library with a single LTO drive needed a costly
upgrade. In addition, the company incurred costs using an outside tape vaulting
service to store its tapes off-site. The IT team and other departments were
also suffering through lengthy backups, with an average backup taking 72 hours.

Conducting a search for a better backup strategy, the senior IT
engineer leveraged the experience of other companies that recommended a
backup-to-disk (B2D) solution.

"I saw a number of problems with a
B2D approach," said Drew Bartow, senior IT engineer, Tipper Tie.
"B2D would require complex
installations and a steep learning curve that would have been problematic for
our small IT team. We also found that the B2D solutions we considered did not
deduplicate data very well and would have cost us $200,000 to deploy across our
four sites, not including maintenance and licensing costs every year."

Pump Solutions Group, which like Tipper Tie is part of the Dover Corp. family
of companies, recommended storing backup data in the cloud with a Whitewater
cloud storage appliance from Riverbed. After a trial, Tipper Tie
deployed four Whitewater 510 appliances, one at each production facility. Each
appliance is connected to a Backup Exec media server. For cloud storage, the
company uses Amazon S3. In the North Carolina
facility, nearly 27TB of backup data has been sent to the Whitewater appliance
so far. The appliance deduplicated the data by a factor of 12.23x
and as a result, only 2.21TB of the nearly 27TB of original backup data is
stored in Amazon S3.

"It took us 15 minutes to install
the Whitewater appliances and get them up and running – it took us longer to
find screws for the brackets," added Bartow. "With Whitewater, we don’t need to spend
money adding new appliances because Whitewater will grow and scale with us.
Another factor in Riverbed’s favor was its excellent support. I can’t say
enough about the technical support we have received from Riverbed throughout
this process."

TCO/ROI
If Tipper
Tie had implemented a common tape backup solution at its four production
facilities, Bartow estimates that it would have cost the company roughly
$155,000 over three years. This figure includes a new server and new tape
library at each site, along with enough tapes for 30-day rotation, maintenance,
licenses, and support. In contrast, the cost of the Whitewater solution over
three years will be only $80,000.

Tipper Tie has also recognized a labor savings since deploying
Whitewater. Bartow has determined that basic tape administration would require
1,170 hours over three years compared to only 234 hours with Whitewater. The
difference (936 hours) represents a savings for Tipper Tie of $28,080.

Using Whitewater, Tipper Tie is able to continue to comply with its SOX regulatory
obligations relating to backup and storage without the need for tape libraries,
media, and off-site media storage. Backing up and storing financial records to
the cloud using Whitewater gives Tipper Tie confidence that its critical data
is secure, encrypted, and quickly accessible.