DXi solution on the money for financial services organization

Financial IT Services Organization Banks on DXi for Data Protection

To support sustainable growth, Celero wanted to improve its existing data backup and disaster recovery process. The Canadian-based information technology services provider chose Quantum’s DXi® disk backup and deduplication platform. The result: Simplified and accelerated backup, restore, and disaster recovery while at the same time reducing costs.  

Challenge: Consolidation and Scalability

Ten years ago, Celero was created by five co-operative organizations with a clear mandate: Take advantage of the economies of scale and deliver reliable, innovative, and cost-effective IT solutions to its owner organizations.

“When it was originally formed, the five parent organizations each had their own unique way of protecting data, and used every type of backup strategy you can name,” says Brant Kubas, Storage Architect at Celero. “This practice was extremely inefficient and was a clear obstacle to the company’s growth plans.”

Kubas went looking for technology that would support both consolidation and scalability. His challenge was to identify a reliable, efficient, and intuitive data protection solution that would support four data centers in geographically dispersed locations.

“Our first step was to assess the tape systems that were in place and investigate how deduplication and replication between data centers could support our existing processes,” adds Kubas. “We needed a simple, cost-effective way to back up and protect client data and a scalable solution that would grow with us.”

Following a side-by-side product evaluation of Quantum and Data Domain, the company decided on two 36TB DXi appliances.

“Deduplication was cutting-edge technology when we first started deploying it, and we wanted a technology partner that was not only 100 percent committed, but would take the time to understand our needs and keep working to meet them,” says Kubas. “We went with the vendor that demonstrated this long-term level of dedication.”

Over the succeeding years, Celero worked with Quantum to upgrade its systems as new DXi generations were introduced. Today, the company has two 200TB DXi8500 solutions and two 40TB DXi6700 Series appliances.

Benefits: Speed and Reliability

For Celero, Quantum’s DXi solutions have simplified and accelerated backup, restore, and disaster recovery, all while reducing IT costs.

“Backups that used to take seven hours for a single client now take just an hour, even with two or more times the data load,” says Kubas. “And deduplication helps us meet our scalability needs while keeping costs manageable.”

Replication is the backbone of Celero’s disaster recovery program. Moving data between locations that used to take a day for tape shuffling and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year is now done transparently and almost instantly using DXi, resulting in annual savings of approximately $200,000.

Overall, it’s been Quantum’s commitment—not only to its customer partnership but also to continued product improvement—that has been critical.

“Quantum’s commitment to continually improving these systems has been a key factor in our long relationship,” Kubas notes. “We’ve seen constant improvement in replication and data ingestion; right now it’s excellent, and it just keeps getting better. That’s Quantum in a nutshell.”