Bank Invests In Dedupe To Shrink Backup Windows

Source: Network Computing

Author: Andrew Conry Murray

If time is money, then First National Bank of Pennsylvania was spending way too much to back up critical applications. A full weekly backup would take 90 hours, and nightly incremental backups were taking around 24 hours. The bank, which has over 220 branches in PA and Ohio, was also bogged down with a tangle of products: 13 different backup systems were employed to service 570 servers. The company had to devote an IT staff person full time just to maintain all these backup products. When the bank decided to migrate from direct-attached storage to a SAN, it also decided to streamline its backup operations and embrace deduplication.

In the summer of 2009, the company purchased a pair of EMC Clariion CX4-240 SANs, one at the bank's production data center and the second at a warm site. Around the same time, it purchased CommVault's Simpana 8 deduplication software. Brian Diegan, vice president of network services for First National Bank, says the company investigated several deduplication products, including EMC Avamar, but at the time Avamar didn't support Novell GroupWise, a critical component of the bank's software infrastructure.

Diegan says he's pleased with Simpana. "We did a week's worth of testing, and now we dedupe everything. We dedupe to the production site first, and then to the warm site." Weekly backups have dropped from 90 hours to 24. Nightly incrementals also happen more quickly. "Nightly backups used to take 24 hours. Now they're down to two hours," says Diegan. Deduplication has also reduced the amount of backup data he has to store on disk, from 40TB down to about 6TB.

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