Recently Chris Watkis, Grey Healthcare Group’s IT Director, and I had an opportunity to exchange messages about what his organization is doing with FalconStor’s virtual storage technology. Here’s a summary of that conversion.
Please introduce yourself and your organization
Grey Healthcare Group (GHG) specializes in advertising, education and interactive marketing for the medical and pharmaceutical industry with services ranging from medical animation and video to online community management. Since memory-intensive media that captures creative intellectual property is the company’s most critical asset, it is imperative that data on more than 20 Dell, HP and Apple servers be protected with high-performance backup and recovery. We needed to establish a lower recovery point objective (RPO) to eliminate any downtime and the resulting impact on business
What are you doing that needs this technology?
As many of the digital files exceed 2 GB in size, GHG needed a data protection solution that would grow with the company and provide greater IT efficiency. As there was finite space on the tape and backup process in place, the time required for backup was increasing and was jeopardizing the data availability and integrity.
A full data restore of more than 40 TB would take three weeks of tape and the 12-person IT staff was spending countless man hours on daily troubleshooting of the tape library system.
To address this issue, wecreated a multiple vendor team incorporating a SpectraLogic tape library, Dell EqualLogic SAN and a virtual tape library from FalconStor.
What did you consider before making a selection?
We explored solutions from numerous vendors, but chose the FalconStor¨ Virtual Tape Library (VTL) storage appliance with integrated deduplication based on key performance advantages and a superior customer service model. The primary reason for choosing FalconStor was the promise of vastly improved restore times, reliable backups and storage capacity optimization.
Why did you select this product?
We choose FalconStor VTL with deduplication as it answered all our needs and is flexible enough to grow with GHG into the future. Also, FalconStor VTL seamlessly integrated into our existing resources including Macintosh graphic applications without limiting file size and structure and allows us to work with any storage vendor. The other key reason was the superior customer service model through which we can communicate directly with FalconStor engineers to quickly resolve any issues that may crop up.
What tangible benefit have you received through the use of this product?
The openness of FalconStor’s storage solution has, by my estimates, saved thousands of dollars by eliminating the need for new hardware purchases and by virtualizing our storage environment. FalconStor’s solution has also increased employee efficiency, as staff are no longer solving tape-related failures and mechanical issues.
Through direct data storage to disk with deduplication, we have reduced the data saved from 175 TB to a 2 TB backup – a dedupe ratio of 75:1. Its scalability and flexibility in protecting and encrypting our mixed-file environment has been an added benefit. However, the most important benefit is being able to recover our critical information within one day. We have experienced little downtime and have been successfully able to move forward on our planning for an off-site business continuity center.
What advice would you offer others facing similar challenges?
I would suggest that if any company is looking at updating its current storage environment, it should examine disk-based backup and replication and deduplication solutions, especially those from FalconStor. FalconStor’s open platform avoids vendor lock-in, provides excellent support in the event of any issue and provides unlimited backup and disaster recovery options. In our case, it not only shrunk our backup window, but increased storage efficiency, reduced our staff’s workloads and gave us the confidence to move forward with our plans for off-site disaster recovery plans.
