Customer Stories

posted on 28 April 2008 10:49

A long-established and now world-wide surfer clothing supplier has switched backup boards, dumped tape and is now riding the disk backup wave.

It was 1952 when Jack O’Neill opened his first surf shop in a garage across the Great Highway in San Francisco and sold his first wetsuits. Since then  the company has expanded into a world-wide designer and manufacturer of sports clothing and footwear. Products range from wetsuits, jackets, body warmers, vests, shirts, skirts and shoes to bags, belts, wallets and caps. Innovative designs include multimedia clothing with built-in connections for cell phones or MP3 players, and a solar backpack that includes a solar battery charger. Surfers can listen to the Beach Boy's Surfing USA whilst riding the breakers.

Well, that sounds great but, really, it's the storage that's more interesting so we'll leave the surfers getting high and wet and fly across the Atlantic to the low countries, to Holland and O'Neill Europe's headquarters.

The company employs 500 people in five sites with the head office in The Netherlands. Its board-riding products can now be purchased in retail outlets around the world via the company’s European Web sites. That means the five European IT centres have to perform and be available - the Web being as unforgiving an environment if you trip up as a surf board.

The data protection and recovery policy was simple: tape. But the usual things happened as the company grew and more and more data had to be backed up. The backups started taking too long and the quality of backed up information was uncertain, rendering recovery problematical.

Peter Maljaars, O'Neill Europe's Global Manager for IT Service and Infrastructure, realized that the tape-based regime would soon become ineffective, saying: “Our home office backups were taking more than 14 hours, which had the potential to impact our day-to-day business operations."

Tapes were stored offsite which meant they had to be fetched if file recovery was needed. Everything just took too long, which was becoming a untenable in the 24X7 we-want-it-now web world. Something had to change.

Maljaars said: “We needed a system that could solve our current backup issues and grow with us. It became clear to us that our tape systems were rapidly running out of gas. We wanted to re-invent our data protection systems and take a more global approach.”

O'Neill changed to disk-based backup but one with compression and de-duplication to make it affordable as well as a way of drastically shortening the backup window, and speeding up recovery time from many hours to a few minutes. There was also a need to have a more bullet-proof disaster recovery capability.

The company picked Data Domain as its storage hardware supplier and used CommVault software to populate the Data Domain boxes. It installed a Data Domain DD565 system at its main office in The Netherlands. This significantly reduced its backup times, increased the volume of data that could be stored on site to a full year and streamlined its data restores. In fact it was up and running backups on the day of its installation.

Then it deployed DD510 systems at the four remote offices which were similarly successful. Overall the company’s 57 terabytes of backup data, which includes virtualized VMware data, has been compressed to just over 3 terabytes of raw disk space.

Maljaars said: “By achieving a compression rate of 18x, we can now store and backup more data with less hardware. We can also instantaneously verify that our data is available for quick restores." They were the first big wins. The next is to use Data Domain’s Replicator software across a network to have the various O'Neill data centres become disaster recovery sites for each other.

According to Maljaars:  "As we deploy replication between headquarters and remote sites, the value proposition increases. We know we have plenty of room to scale our systems as our data grows, and we will eventually have a unified, fully-automated data protection process across our offices.”

The new system has proved it can perform as a great recovery facility. The head office DD565 appliance was the machine involved as Maljaars explained: “Following a problem with our production environment, we were able to restore 250 GB of data within a couple of hours using the Data Domain system. If we’d had to search through tapes and try to effect this restore from our previous system, it would have been a protracted process. The combination of Data Domain and CommVault’s backup software made it simple and fast.”

The reduced timing associated with O’Neill’s now disk-based backup process means that the threat of its backup window extending into the business day has been eliminated. In addition, the fact that it can now maintain a full year's worth  of backup data on-line virtually eliminates the likelihood of O’Neill ever having to restore from tape again.

Summing up Maljaars said: “Our Data Domain system has helped us to respond more quickly and effectively to IT problems, which ultimately means less downtime for our offices and staff across Europe.”

O'Neill's data protection has moved into the modern age. It is much faster, much more reliable and will enable a radically improved disaster recovery scheme. Tape-based alternatives are simply not compatible with a business selling consumer goods via the 24x7, 365 days a year, world-wide web. It's no real surprise that O'Neill surfed to CommVault and Data Domain.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}