Corporate Express de-dupes with EMC

January 15, 2009: Office and business products supplier Corporate Express has tackled its backup and recovery headaches with data de-duplication technologies from EMC.

Having made 72 acquisitions since 1995, the company has staff in more than 50 locations across Australia and New Zealand. Due to its rapid growth, the company needed to move to new corporate headquarters in Australia, and its existing data centre had run out of capacity. The company did not want to move its data to a temporary data centre before moving to its new corporate headquarters.

Corporate Express solved the problem by virtualising its server environment using VMware technology, enabling the company to reduce the number of physical servers in its data centre.

In addition to expanding the use of its data centre via server virtualisation, Corporate Express wanted to better manage its data backup and recovery systems across virtual and physical environments, including remote offices. The company was producing more corporate data every year and the IT department faced an expansion of its tape storage infrastructure. As a result, they looked at and evaluated new data de-duplication functionality available in backup solutions, which allows organizations to reduce the amount of redundant data before it’s backed up to secondary storage.

“We trialed a few different products and then we decided to go with EMC’s Avamar solution.” said Mark Jones, Technology Infrastructure Manager at Corporate Express. “EMC was far ahead of the competition in delivering a proven de-duplication backup solution. We have been able to halve our backup window times and achieve a massive reduction in our data.”

Corporate Express has been able to reduce the data in its network from 92TB to 44TB. Jones said the implementation of the Avamar solution simplified the management of the company’s back-up environment and freed senior technical staff for other mission-critical projects.

Since deploying the Avamar solution, Corporate Express has reduced the amount of data backed up on a daily basis from 1.5TB to 150GB. Now, backups take 30 minutes, compared to six hours in the past. Furthermore, full backups can be completed in five hours instead of nine.

By freeing up space in the company’s data production environment, Corporate Express improved its overall application performance and created additional space in its tiered storage environment. This resulted in significant IT infrastructure savings for the organization.

In addition to the server and backup consolidation projects, Corporate Express focused its attention to virtualising its storage infrastructure. This project has enabled the organisation to extract more efficiency from its network, and also created a tiered storage infrastructure within the business.

“Our storage demands were rapidly increasing and it was taking too long to deploy applications and services,” said Jones. “We also did not classify our storage effectively so a non-critical application might be given priority over a more critical application. Working with EMC, we were able to address this challenge head-on and tier our storage requirements effectively.”

The company is now looking at continuing to drive new and innovative storage initiatives by implementing network attached storage (NAS) gateways connected to the storage area network (SAN) as well as potentially upgrading their tier 1 platform to gain improved capacity and performance levels.

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