NZ banks on Data Domain dedup

July 3, 2009:Bank of New Zealand has implemented Data Domain's deduplication and replication solutions at its two primary data centres.

The centres comprise over 900 servers that support a full range of business-critical applications, including transactional databases, financial applications as well as file and email services.

The existing tape backup infrastructure was struggling to keep pace with the Bank's burgeoning data growth. Frequent issues with tape drives extended backup windows, which in turn placed additional load on the servers during work hours and impacted daily business operations.

Virtualisation is a strategic objective for the Bank and VMware technology is an important means to consolidate servers and improve data centre efficiencies. As an important part of BNZ's backup infrastructure refresh project, the Infrastructure Design team looked closely at deduplication storage approaches to fully realise the effectiveness of protecting virtual machines (VMs).

"We wanted to avoid any major reconfiguration of our environment," said Rod Park, Manager of Infrastructure Design for BNZ. "Data Domain integrated with Symantec NetBackup using OpenStorage (OST), and has proved straightforward to create policies and manage backups."

Park added, "Support from Data Domain allowed us to thoroughly test the proposed solution." BNZ has purchased two Data Domain DD690 systems which are deployed at data centres about 650 km apart.

BNZ currently keeps four full weekly backups and eight incremental backups online for improved recovery time objectives. The new backup environment requires less administration and has been enhanced by the simplified management and time-saving benefits that the tight integration between Data Domain systems and NetBackup OST provides. This has alleviated the Bank's previous backup window challenges.

Bi-directional replication between the two data centers is also expected to provide comprehensive, automated disaster recovery with quick recovery of VMs and other application data from each replica DD690 system.

BNZ has reduced the number of physical tapes in use and now only data requiring a retention period of seven years or more is transferred to tape and stored offsite. This has also reduced backup and administration costs.

"The team is now able to complete backups within our designated backup windows, and meet our retention policy objectives. We're confident that this solution will support future growth," concluded Park.