Global Firm Goes from Grey to Green with Dedupe

Grey Healthcare Group (GHG), a WPP company, is one of the world’s top five healthcare communications companies. Headquartered in New York, its global network includes 43 companies in 22 countries. As a company that specializes in advertising, education, and interactive marketing for the medical and pharmaceutical industry, GHG provides multimedia services to help clients generate awareness, enhance brand identity, and drive business. Since data that captures creative intellectual property is GHG’s most critical asset, it is imperative that it is protected with high-performance backup and recovery.

Expansion is good for business, bad for storage

GHG’s creative offerings, which include video, photography, and online services, produce large media files often exceeding 2GB in size. As the business expanded, the amount of data requiring protection nearly doubled, challenging the capacity and performance capabilities of the storage architecture.

“Our tape library was at its maximum capacity, and even with 8TB on our SAN, we wanted more storage to protect our work,” says Chris Watkis, IT Director, GHG. With finite space on each tape and backup processes running at set speeds, the time required for routine backups and restores continued to increase, jeopardizing data availability and integrity. Adds Watkis, “We were seeing an equation of escalating investment with diminishing returns.”

Backup reliability was another huge concern for the IT group. To guarantee that a full, up-to-date restore could be performed, three weeks of tape had to be collected. The tape library itself required almost daily troubleshooting, utilizing man-hours and cutting into the IT budget. “Robotic failures, stuck tapes, bad tapes, bad connections – these were very real concerns for our Systems Administrator,” says Watkis.

If a system failure were to occur, it would take several days to restore data from the tape library. In an effort to eliminate downtime and the resulting business impact, GHG revised its storage strategies, establishing a lower recovery time objective (RTO) and exploring virtualization and deduplication to foster a greener, more efficient storage infrastructure.

Harnessing the power of disk and dedupe to improve scalability

With only a month to put the new system into place, Watkis explored several options and chose the highly flexible, industry-leading FalconStor ® Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with embedded deduplication along with SAN technology and a tape library for archiving.

“The most critical selling point for us was the promise of vastly improved restore times, facilitated by disk-based protection,” says Watkis. “We saw how FalconStor VTL could deliver business continuity by optimizing our storage capacity and ensuring viable backups.”

In addition, FalconStor VTL with deduplication stood out for its flexibility in environments – an important advantage. It offered easy integration with existing storage resources, including the Macintosh applications heavily favored by GHG’s graphic arts teams. “Other vendors’ solutions put limits on file size and structure,” Watkis explains. “That was a huge drawback for us, with our corporate dollar earned in multi-channel media.” According to Watkis, other key factors included the maintenance response times and warranty contract that FalconStor offered.

GHG worked with VirtuIT to implement the FalconStor solution . Backups are now done directly to disk using a backup server connected to a FalconStor VTL storage appliance. FalconStor VTL provides high-performance enterprise-level disk-based data protection and integrated global data deduplication to optimize storage and bandwidth utilization. Robust media management simplifies tape management and enhances tape security. Offering multi-node scalability, FalconStor VTL emulates vast arrays of tape libraries, drives, and cartridges, ensuring complete backup transparency. By enabling GHG to keep backup data on disk, FalconStor VTL significantly improves the speed and dependability of recovery.

FalconStor deduplication technology, which eliminates redundant data and compresses unique data, has reduced GHG’s data sets for backup from 175TB to 2TB – a ratio of more than 75:1. “This was quite eye-opening,” Watkis states. “It made us more aware of just how many duplicate files were being backed up and re-backed up by the previous system.” With this solution, GHG can schedule deduplication to run after backup completes or concurrently with backup, once the first complete write to virtual tape finishes. Neither process impacts the backup window.

Capacity reduction, cost savings, and more

The performance advantages of the FalconStor solution have produced a myriad of benefits – shrinking the backup window, increasing storage efficiencies, and reducing administrative workloads.FalconStor VTL with deduplication has eradicated the challenges of physical tape and enabled GHG to back up more data using less hardware, less bandwidth, less power, and less physical space. This has helped immensely with GHG’s green IT initiatives. Online storage capacity is now virtually unlimited, and IT can perform reliable restores of data anywhere on the network in less than one business day.

From a financial perspective, Watkis estimates that GHG has saved thousands of dollars in new hardware purchases by virtualizing its storage environment, and FalconStor VTL has saved significant time that might otherwise have been spent remedying media and mechanical failures associated with tape. “Optimizing our storage environment has enabled IT to deliver on the promise of round-the-clock data availability and integrity,” states Watkis. “In this sense, we serve as a key driver of business continuity and growth.”

In addition, the encryption capability of FalconStor VTL makes it easier for GHG to safeguard sensitive data from research and focus groups in order to maintain compliance with healthcare privacy guidelines. By exporting data from the FalconStor VTL to physical tapes in an encrypted format, Watkis and his team can ensure that data is protected from interception and unauthorized access. This protection will become even more essential when the company implements its future disaster recovery (DR) plan.

With plans to implement offsite DR in the coming year, Watkis and his team intend to use the FalconStor VTL to perform remote replication over a WAN. Deduplication of stored data will minimize the amount of data transferred, sharply reducing bandwidth needs and associated costs.

“With FalconStor, we have addressed the twin challenges of explosive data growth and limited storage capacity with a single, powerful solution,” Watkis surmises. “FalconStor VTL integrated easily and seamlessly into our existing infrastructure, and its deduplication capabilities gave us the ability to address all of our business continuity issues in one swing. The solution has allowed us to achieve our business objectives and puts us in a position to confidently and proactively prepare for the future.”