Explosive Data Growth Prompts Change in Herbalife's Backup Strategy

"We are experiencing explosive rates of data growth." That statement is made every day by many organizations in many places. But when it is your organization experiencing the explosive data growth rates and you are the one responsible for managing and protecting it, it takes on a whole new level of meaning.

That was the situation Herbalife's Principal IT Engineer, Andy Hansen, found Herbalife in as the amount of data that Herbalife was managing had exploded from 32 TBs to 240 TBs in a little over a year's time. Hansen's task? Explain and justify to his management why Herbalife needed to replace its existing backup software with new data management and protection software that would meet its needs now and into the future.

In a previous blog entry, Hansen explained why Herbalife's current backup software was failing to meet its data protection requirements even before its current explosion in data growth occurred and exacerbated the situation. Then in a subsequent blog entry, Hansen talked about how he narrowed the field down from three competing enterprise data protection products to just one: CommVault® Simpana®. Now he had to help his management also understand why Herbalife's existing backup software no longer met its needs as well as why they needed to make an investment in CommVault.

To do so, Hansen used a two-fold approach. He first laid out to them all of the areas in which Herbalife's existing backup software was leaving it exposed: failed backup jobs, inadequate reporting capabilities and its general inability to protect and recover data locally and remotely. But in order to convince his management to bring in a new data management and protection software and proceed with CommVault Simpana, he made a simple but poignant statement to them, "We have not invested properly for the amount of data that we need to protect."

That statement got their attention. In much the same way his management had previously recognized that they needed to invest in ERP software to match new business demands, that statement helped them to understand that they needed to make a similar investment in their data protection software to match the explosive rate of data growth that had resulted from the deployment of the ERP software.  And once the investment was made and CommVault was purchased and deployed, Herbalife recognized numerous tangible and intangible benefits including:

• Push agent technology. CommVault Simpana eliminated the need for backup administrators to manually access each server and install backup agents as Simpana could manually push agents out to each server, even in remote sites. Simpana became the rallying cry around which he used to drive a corporate initiative to deploy Active Directory everywhere and simplify the management of their corporate network as well as their deployment of CommVault Simpana.
• Backup success rates climbed to over 99%. Using disk was part of the Hansen's plan to redesign his backup infrastructure anyway but when it was used in conjunction with CommVault Simpana, he saw his backup success rates climb to over 99%. In the process, he reduced his backup windows while increasing the amount of data he was able to protect. Further, prior to using CommVault Simpana in conjunction with disk, he never considered backing up his test and development environments as there was no way he could meet his backup windows backing up this data. Now using CommVault and disk, he could complete the backup of all of data - production, test and development - in less time.
• Backup is no longer a full-time position. About a year prior to switching to CommVault, Herbalife had hired a full-time backup administrator to perform backup tasks such as tape management and troubleshooting backup problems. But once CommVault was deployed, that position become almost obsolete as Hansen now thought the administrator was spending at most an hour or two a day troubleshooting backups and that was only on the rare occasions when there was problems. The rest of the time, all the backup administrator does now is check the morning reports for any errors. This freed up the backup administrator to do regular cleanup and maintenance on Herbalife's Active Directory implementation.
• Successful Oracle database backups and restores. The introduction of the ERP software had resulted in the creation of huge Oracle databases in Herbalife's environment that were over 5 TBs in size. Using CommVault, Hansen could now backup or restore these Oracle databases in about 11 hours. Further, when he did test restores, the only comment he ever got back from his Oracle DBAs was, "We're good, thanks."
• No extra backup reporting software was necessary. Many times when organizations select backup software, they often need to purchase third party backup reporting software to help them manage the backups. In the case of CommVault, Hansen did not find that a necessary at all as it included all of the canned reports that he needed, allowed him to set alerts for every system and gave him the ability to holistically view his backup environment.

But maybe the most telling statement about the benefits that CommVault Simpana provided was Hansen's response to the two questions I asked him before we parted. I asked him, "Did he feel exposed before he implemented CommVault?" and, "Did he still felt exposed now?" Hansen replied, "Absolutely I felt exposed. I never had any confidence that I could recover my data. But now I rarely if ever feel that way and when I do, it is because someone forgot to communicate to me that they put a new server into production." If that is not an argument for investing properly in a data protection solution and making a change in backup strategy, I don't know what is.