City of Hamilton, Canada, Deploys Solution From HPE Nimble and Cohesity

Cohesity, Inc. announced that the City of Hamilton, one of the ten most populous municipalities in Canada, achieved improvements to its backup and recovery and data management processes with a joint solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE) and Cohesity.

City Of Hamilton Deploys Joint Solution From Hpe And Cohesity

The City of Hamilton needed a better way to backup its primary infrastructure, which consists of approximately 600 servers with 400TB of production data running across two data centers on HPE Nimble Storage. The IT division, which supports more than 75 different public services for the city, including public health, emergency services, and garbage and recycling, initially chose point products for backups to replace an outdated process of backing up data to magnetic tape. The point products were effective in the short term, but the team ran into problems when they tried to scale up, frequently running out of storage capacity and missing targeted backup windows. When it came to backing up data tied to key public services, this was unacceptable.

After HPE announced an OEM partnership with Cohesity to empower customers to more efficiently backup their data and solve critical challenges pertaining to mass data fragmentation, the city’s IT team decided to deploy Cohesity DataPlatform as a repository for the massive volumes of backup data using third-party backup software. As performance and scale problems with the third-party backup software continued, the team opted to use Cohesity DataProtect to handle backup and recovery natively – deploying it as a validated HPE solution running on ProLiant servers.

With the switch to DataProtect, the city achieved an efficient backup and recovery process while simplifying management of its data infrastructure. File server backups that used to take 12 hours are completed in 12 minutes, and the backup window went from five days to five hours. By improving deduplication with Cohesity, backups of the city’s Exchange email system shrunk to approximately one-sixth of their previous size, with additional efficiencies realized with the city’s file, object, and application servers.

“Throughput and capacity are amazing, and leveraging technology like Change Block Tracking gives us optimized performance levels we have never seen in our environment,” said Jonathon Mancini, supervisor, data center operations, City of Hamilton. “The Cohesity solution is the secret sauce that makes our backup infrastructure better.“

In addition, the performance and scale improvements saved more than 20 hours of staff time per week, allowing IT employees to focus on new projects rather than dealing with cost overruns, complexity, and compliance risks. With Cohesity Helios, the IT team can manage and automate infrastructure across its entire environment from a single pane of glass and monitor any changes in their backup data to prevent a potential ransomware attack.

Deploying the complete Cohesity solution, validated and sold by HPE, also eliminated expenses associated with licensing, third-party backup software, and managing disparate hardware.

As a government agency, the City of Hamilton has strict procurement rules, and the ability to purchase the Cohesity solution on HPE – an established vendor of record for the government – allowed the IT team to avoid a complex and time-consuming order process and use the HPE hardware they knew and trusted.

“We have combined innovative software from Cohesity and industry-leading infrastructure solutions and services from HPE to deliver incredible data management capabilities and unmatched benefits to forward-thinking organizations like the City of Hamilton,” said Patrick Osborne, VP, big data and secondary storage, HPE. “With a streamlined procurement process for a wide range of certified joint solutions, we are seeing a growing number of enterprises realize the value of the combination of Cohesity and HPE technologies.“

With a reliable backup process in place, the City of Hamilton is looking to expand the use cases for its Cohesity deployment to cover file shares and cloud archiving, further reducing mass data fragmentation complexities. The IT team also plans to leverage Cohesity MarketPlace to download applications that run directly on DataPlatform to analyze backup data and uncover new insights.

The City of Hamilton realized benefits:

Backup times for incremental backups reduced by 60x – from 12 hours to 12 minutes
Faster restores with the ability to find any file across 5.7PB of backup data within 30s, saving several hours of staff time each week
Substantial reduction in storage utilization, using one-sixth of disk space compared to previous solutions, thanks to variable deduplication and compression
Combined savings on capital and operational expenses from licensing, infrastructure, and staff efficiencies
Flexibility to extend on-premises data centers to hybrid and public clouds

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