Resilience, Compliance and Cost Savings with Data Protection as a Service

Overview

Challenge

• Streamline a costly and complex backup environment by introducing a centralized shared services model for enterprise-wide data protection.

Solution

• Harness the partnership between Hitachi Vantara, Cisco and Commvault to provide an end-to-end solution including servers, storage, software and managed services.

Outcome

• Improved backup reliability, reduced incidents by 80%, facilitated DORA compliance, and cut costs by enabling redeployment of internal resources.

Challenge

For several years, this large European financial services company has relied on Hitachi Vantara as the managed service provider (MSP) for its SAN and cloud storage environment. The Hitachi Global Services team acts as the custodian of the data that flows through the company’s business-critical applications every day and has built a strong relationship with the customer’s internal IT team.

However, the task of protecting and preserving the company’s data was entrusted to a backup infrastructure built on another vendor’s hardware, managed by a global systems integrator (GSI). GSI’s backup services were not universally popular, and several business units had their own contracts for data protection with other providers or managed their backups in-house.
The company wanted to streamline its organization, and aimed to create a true shared service for data protection that would enable staff to focus on more strategic projects, instead of spending time managing backup operations.

Realizing that this would be a major procurement project, the company issued a request for proposals (RFP) covering both the modernization of the backup infrastructure and the provision of managed services for its backup operations. For Hitachi Vantara, this was an opportunity to become the client’s preferred storage vendor and MSP across all areas of its European storage operations – STaaS, SAN, hybrid cloud and data protection.

Solution

To build a state-of-the-art data protection service that could scale to meet the needs of one of Europe’s largest financial services companies, Hitachi Vantara leveraged its alliances with two best-in-class technology companies: Commvault, to provide the data protection software, and Cisco, to provide the compute capacity to run it effectively. Meanwhile, Hitachi would provide the storage layer and the managed services team to build and operate the entire new environment.

The solution was designed around Commvault’s Hyperscale X architecture and built on a Hitachi Everflex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud infrastructure solution comprising 48 Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers and a 10PB Hitachi Content Platform for Cloud Scale storage cluster. A flexible five-year EverFlex  Managed contract would allow the customer to scale the backup environment up to 70PB if necessary, and Hitachi Global Services would take on full responsibility for infrastructure management and backup operations under a flexible, scalable Hitachi EverFlex contract.

The implementation of the new infrastructure went smoothly, but when the Hitachi Global Services team took over operational responsibilities from the previous GSI, they discovered the existing backup environment was far less healthy than expected. There were significant errors and duplications in backup processes, and many backup jobs failed to be completed. The Hitachi team raised these issues with the customer and helped them clean up the mess, conducting a full review and remediation exercise to troubleshoot and fix or redesign problematic backups.

At several points, the Hitachi team has gone above and beyond to ensure the customer’s needs were met. For example, when the company sponsored a major sporting event, Hitachi spun up additional infrastructure and brought in more managed services personnel to enhance security and protect the business against cyber threats. Impressed by the Hitachi team’s cybersecurity expertise, the company then asked for help implementing additional safeguards to facilitate compliance with the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).

Outcome

With a truly effective end-to-end service for data protection, the company has been able to consolidate infrastructure and redeploy IT staff to more strategic roles, unlocking significant cost savings. The new Hitachi and Cisco hardware is also more compact and energy-efficient than the company’s legacy infrastructure, boosting sustainability and saving on power and cooling costs in the data center.

With Hitachi EverFlex, the company gains an extremely flexible and scalable commercial model that converts CapEx to OpEx. Instead of planning, managing and investing in costly hardware refreshes every few years, the company benefits from data protection as a service approach that reduces all the complexity to a simple, predictable monthly cost. EverFlex also allows the business to grow its data protection environment without limit, while only paying for the resources it uses.

Finally, and most importantly for the business, the Hitachi, Cisco and Commvault solution has transformed the quality and robustness of the company’s backup services. On a monthly basis, the customer has seen an 80% reduction in backup incidents, which means that its data is better protected and the risk of disruption to business-critical systems is greatly reduced.