Cohesity, a leader of hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced that it has deployed its next generation data protection solution at Vita Group, a leading publicly listed Australian retailer.

Cohesity will support the organisation as it transforms its backup and restore operations while gaining a valuable secondary storage solution with flexible feature functionality. At the same time, Vita Group aims to shave the time taken per week for backup and restore from three days to one day and expects to save $500,000 over five years through simplified management, ease of use, and significant time savings for management and administration.

Vita Group operates more than 100 Telstra-branded retail stores, as well as five Telstra Business Technology Centres. It also has its own technology accessories brand, Sprout; Vita Enterprise Solutions for large enterprise and government ICT; men's athletic wear brand, SQDAthletica; and a rapidly expanding non-invasive medical business, Artisan Aesthetic Clinics, consisting of premium medical-grade skincare clinics. Altogether, it has 130-plus retail points of presence across Australia and approximately 1,700 team members.

Vita Group previously used Commvault for backups to an EMC Isilon primary storage array before being aged out to tape. The storage platform ran across two physical data centres set up in an active-active configuration. The complexity meant Vita Group needed a dedicated backup administrator with in-depth knowledge of Commvault to drive backup and recovery but the retailer still ran up against limitations.

"At the same time, there was a hard limit on the number of items that the indexing node could serve, requiring a substantial investment in further infrastructure to resolve," said Michael Lawrence, IT operations manager, Vita Group. "The index contained metadata that Commvault required to be able to locate and perform operations on the data that it backed up. Vita Group found that older files would simply drop from the index unless excessive disk space was provided, making them much harder to locate and recover. We wanted to simplify the backup process and reduce the time it took."

Increasingly, the legacy infrastructure was also unable to handle Vita Group's evolving infrastructure needs with the retailer using more software as a service (SaaS) resulting in the growth in storage and backup requirements for applications such as SharePoint and Office 365. It had also started to use Azure for secondary storage of its backups.

Vita Group subsequently concluded that it needed a flexible, cost-effective hyperconverged solution that would simplify management and reduce backup and recovery times across its entire infrastructure. It has deployed a cluster of five hyperconverged node appliances, including cloud archive and tape archive and supports integration with ExaGrid and other vendors.

Although Vita Group is continuing to use EMC as its primary storage platform, it will now use Cohesity as a secondary storage platform, mostly for file storage. The EMC array is due for refresh within 18 months, and Vita Group expects Cohesity will reduce the cost of that upgrade.

"Being able to go through and identify things on our primary storage that can be moved to Cohesity will reduce the amount of primary storage we'll need to procure," said Lawrence.

Vita Group found it was spending three days a week ‘keeping the lights on with Commvault' but has now reduced that to one day a week using Cohesity.

Another big win for Vita Group is that its entire infrastructure team can now run backup and restore, rather than everything passing through a single specialist administrator.

"I'm in a position where any one of the infrastructure team of six can introduce a backup and perform a restore from Cohesity. We now have a team of people that can backup and restore our environment. There are massive advantages in having a product that's straightforward and simple enough that any one of the team can do it, as well as introducing a good bit of risk mitigation," said Lawrence.

Vita Group expects to expand its use of Cohesity as the functionality in the platform increases. In particular, it hopes to use Cohesity to back up data from its software as a service (SaaS) environment in the future, including Office 365.