B U Y E R C A S E S T U D Y
Q u a n t u m ' s D X i D e d u p l i c a t i o n S y s t e m I m p r o v e s E f f i c i e n c y
a n d R e d u c e s C o s t s
Robert Amatruda Marshall Amaldas Laura DuBois
I D C O P I N I O N
Increasingly, disk systems are being placed in the data protection path in many customer environments. The use of disk in the data protection process relieves many of the backup bottlenecks associated with using traditional storage methodologies — such as tape. Customers are demanding faster backup, restore, and recovery to meet their shrinking backup windows. As a result, many customers are augmenting or foregoing further investments in physical tape infrastructure in favor of secondary disk. These secondary disk systems may include functionalities such as tape virtualization, deduplication, compression, continuous data protection (CDP), and/or replication. Fossil Inc., a global design, marketing, and distribution company specializing in consumer fashion accessories, has implemented the Quantum DXi storage systems with integrated data deduplication. The use of the DXi-Series storage systems has yielded Fossil significant operational benefits and cost savings for its backup infrastructure and protection of its secondary data. Findings include: IDC research indicates that over the past several years, the customer drivers for
increased investment in disk-based data protection solutions result from the need to improve backup window time, provide faster restore and recovery times, enable seamless integration with existing backup applications, improve performance and utilization of backup resources, and lower operational and capital costs.
Data deduplication is dramatically improving IT economics by minimizing storage footprint requirements, backup windows, recovery times, and network bandwidth consumption. In customer environments, data deduplication is accelerating backup and recovery efficiency and provides measurable cost reductions especially when compared with legacy processes.
I N T H I S B U Y E R C A S E S T U D Y
This IDC Buyer Case Study assesses the deployment and use of Quantum's DXi5500 and DXi7500 storage systems with integrated data deduplication technology at Fossil. Additionally, IDC examined the operational and financial benefits that Fossil gained after deploying the Quantum solutions. IDC conducted an in-depth interview with Ben Cloud, systems administrator for Fossil's Apple and Windows server platforms, who outlined the internal analysis that Fossil went through in examining the functionality, labor costs, time savings, hardware and software savings, and tape media
requirements for deploying a deduplication-enabled DXi-Series storage system. The results of Fossil's internal technology assessment identified key areas for improvements in Fossil's operational and capital costs.
S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W
O r g a n i z a t i o n O v e r v i e w
Headquartered in Richardson, Texas, Fossil is a well-known name in the retail industry, employing over 8,000 personnel. Fossil is a global design, marketing, and distribution company that specializes in consumer fashion accessories. The company's principal offerings include an extensive line of men's and women's fashion watches and jewelry, handbags, small leather goods, belts, sunglasses, cold weather accessories, footwear, and apparel. Fossil offers products at varying price points to service the needs of its style-conscious customers across all age groups. Distribution across North America employs department stores, specialty watch and jewelry stores, company-owned retail stores and outlets, and sales through catalogs and ecommerce Web sites. Internationally, Fossil products are sold in over 100 countries through a combination of company-owned stores and independent distributors in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Central and South America, Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the Middle East. In addition, Fossil products are offered on airlines and cruise ships. Ben Cloud has been on Fossil's IT staff for 17 years in a variety of roles, currently including applications selection, support, and testing; infrastructure planning, design, and vendor selection; and day-to-day backups and restores as required by the organization's service-level agreements (SLAs). The total IT staff numbers over 100 and is responsible for Fossil's North America operations. Critical to Fossil's course of operations are applications such as SAP and Microsoft Exchange. Fossil's data types i n c l u d e f i l e s y s t e m d a t a, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SQL, and product design/marketing images.
At the infrastructure level, Fossil relies heavily on VMware to virtualize its systems, and currently, about 50% of the environment is virtualized. Fossil uses Symantec NetBackup and EMC NetWorker to protect production data. Fossil's hardware includes standard Windows servers, Macintosh servers, and over 100TB of storage in the North America region using EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, and Apple storage. Currently, physical tape processing uses Quantum's Scalar i500 Tape Library with LTO-4 tape drives using encryption native to the drives. Fossil's disk-based backup systems are Quantum's DXi5500 and DXi7500.
C h a l l e n g e s a n d S o l u t i o n
standing requirement to support physical tape offsite for export. Moreover, for retailers, point-of-sale networks are critical and must be operational.
Given this set of requirements, Fossil needed to deploy a disk-based data protection solution that would be interoperable with its existing Windows and Macintosh platforms. Quantum was an incumbent vendor at Fossil. The Fossil IT staff used Quantum's Pathlight VX and tape products prior to the DXi-Series deployment. Quantum's Pathlight is a scalable enterprise backup and restore solution that integrates disk and tape in a single, unified system. The Pathlight VX uses SATA disk arrays to double users' backup performance while providing RAID reliability. Furthermore, the Pathlight VX allows for a path to tape- and policy-based management options that let users balance their recovery service-level objectives. Fossil's decision to use the Pathlight VX system was its ease of integration into the company's existing data protection environment. However, the Pathlight VX did not support data reduction or data deduplication.
Fossil initially deployed Quantum's DXi5500 with deduplication in its environment using it in a VTL emulation mode for its production data. Approximately 18 months later, Fossil deployed the DXi7500 with data dedupliction. Fossil redirected its daily backups that would be written to physical tape to its DXi-Series systems. Quantum had always delivered or "overdelivered" what it promised in terms of both functionality and support. Employees were comfortable with previous-generation products and did not require much training for the new technology. Migration issues and costs were avoided so employees could concentrate on the new functionality. Fossil calls Quantum a "great vendor" and is extremely happy with its performance in terms of both time and support. Quantum's engineering and support staffs received outstanding evaluations.
The net effect of using deduplication is that backup to physical tape is now done only quarterly because there is less unique data to back up with the duplicates removed. Fossil now sends 90 days of incremental backups to its DXi-Series system that would have otherwise gone directly to tape. The DXi7500 has reduced its data content by 30:1, or 96%, from 356TB to a little over 13TB. The DXi5500 system has experienced a 70% reduction from about 23TB to 7TB. As a result, the number of physical tape cartridges has been significantly reduced from well over 2,000 to 500 annually. In addition, the potential for data loss from misplaced tape cartridges has been alleviated with fewer tape cartridges in rotation.
R e s u l t s
Although your mileage may vary, Fossil's results are indicative of the benefits that deduplication can mean to a typical organization using tape as its backup and archival media. Results included:
Reduced backup administration. Workers previously spent 25% of their time managing backups, which amounted to 7–12 hours per week. This figure has been reduced by 75%, so the IT staff now spends only 1.5–3 hours per week managing the backups. Backups themselves now take 50% less time.
Restore times reduced to minutes. Fossil stated that restoration of data from physical tape typically took up to 2 hours using the older system; with the DXi-Series systems, restoration now takes a matter of minutes. It is noted that frequent restores are not the norm and occur only on an exceptional basis. However, it is an indicator of Fossil's ability to get back to normal when recovery is necessary.
Tape handling minimized. In less than two weeks after implementing the solution, Fossil did not have to handle local tapes or transport them to an offsite location. This improved the security of the data and mitigated the risk of removable tapes getting compromised while offsite. Tape handling was reduced from daily to once a week or less.
Tape media costs reduced. Another added benefit is the consumption of tapes has reduced drastically — from 2,500 to 500 annually. The media purchase savings alone amount to about $190,000 over a five-year period. These statistics do not include operational and labor costs associated with storage and handling of physical tapes. Fewer tapes mean fewer opportunities for human error — such as "pulling the wrong tape."
Reduced data footprint. Through the use of deduplication in the DXi systems, Fossil has been able to achieve an average deduplication ratio of approximately 30:1. This translates directly to reduced cost in tape purchases as well as hard disk costs in comparison with traditional VTL solutions without deduplication (such as the older Pathlight VX series). This reduction in storage capacity savings also translates to smaller footprint, power, and cooling requirements. Fossil is currently evaluating data deduplication of its primary (or active) data as a future project. The benefits are different for primary data than for secondary data. Data identified for deduplication is processed inline, often resulting in throughput improvements versus storage efficiencies. A replication project will allow Fossil to withstand natural and man-made disasters because a second (or third) location has a copy of the data from which to rebuild. Fossil has a large graphic design department and that area has about 5TB of data under management. Included are image files such as Photoshop and Illustrator. These files lend themselves to deduplication because changes often are only slight, leaving much of the data available for deduplication. Fossil's experience is that Word files (.doc) and TIFF files offer similar reduction ratios.
E S S E N T I A L G U I D A N C E
The opportunity looks bright for disk-based data protection, in particular those systems with deduplication. IDC believes solution vendors should consider the following guidance:
Communicate to customers the value proposition and the potential benefits of using more disk-based storage solutions for data protection.
Provide nondisruptive integration of disk-based storage solutions so customers need not change any procedures and policies.
Support seamless data movement capability from disk-based systems to physical tape to support archive and disaster recovery.
Support industry-standard interfaces, APIs, and application software to ease deployment.
Add features that optimize storage efficiency, such as data deduplication. Although this may reduce the potential number of terabytes per installation, vendors that offer storage efficiency will be compelling.
L E A R N M O R E
R e l a t e d R e s e a r c h
Storage Solutions: Disk-Based Data Protection, Continuity, and Recovery — Overview of Vendors and Product Solutions (IDC #222918, April 2010)
IDC Survey: Adoption Patterns of Disk-Based Backup (IDC #222793, April 2010) IDC's Worldwide Disk-Based Data Protection, Continuity, and Recovery
Taxonomy, 2009 (IDC #221256, December 2009)
