CASE STUDY
KEY BENEFITS
• Lower TCO and rapid ROI – three to nine months
• 780 hours of productivity regained
• US $ 72,000 a year in cost savings and a significantly lower cloud archiving investment
• Entire environment backs up in hours versus days for just one VM
process was completed in one evening with no user and very little overall system impact .
“ Because of the way the old system had been architected and given that our goal was no downtime , we needed to automate the entire migration process which Cohesity helped us to do . We had maybe five minutes of downtime ,” said Michael Hankins , IT Infrastructure Manager , Pilot Thomas Logistics .
By securely exposing hourly , high-performance Cohesity backup snapshots via SMB for native Windows file explorer access , Pilot has enabled employees to perform self-service file recovery instantly without IT assistance .
This recently allowed a team member to access a project file share to recover a single deleted folder in minutes . This was impossible with the older product because backups often did not complete before the next one was scheduled to start .
Although Pilot had only planned to upgrade NAS , the success and cost efficiency of Cohesity ’ s single , software-defined platform empowered the company to also improve its backups and archiving . Tape backups with the legacy product took a month , and if they failed , caused the company to revert to the prior month with no way to recover lost data , if needed . Moreover , the backup engineer located in Texas had to drive to Pilot ’ s data center in Oklahoma once a month to manage the tapes .
“ It was a huge liability and risk ,” said Hankins . “ We could be spending up to 20 hours a week just managing our backups .”
Pilot is also taking advantage of the ability to run apps on the Cohesity platform . It has installed two Cohesity Marketplace apps – Spotlight and Insight – both of which mitigate risk . With Spotlight , for example , Pilot was able to quickly generate a report of all of the files an employee had deleted prior to departure .
“ Monitoring access to sensitive files on specific shares and quickly running reports is easy with Cohesity and Spotlight ,” said Hankins . “ I wouldn ’ t have had any tools to do that without Spotlight . It ’ s definitely very useful .”
Results
Pilot has experienced rapid ROI since consolidating its data management with Cohesity – the initial platform paying for itself in roughly six to nine months and cloud archiving in three months . In contrast , most data center solutions typically have an ROI of 12 – 24 months . With Cohesity SmartFiles , one IT team has reclaimed up to 10 hours per week – no longer troubleshooting , supporting tickets and traveling to the data center to replace failed NAS drives .
A second IT team reclaimed the nearly five hours a week it spent creating shares , managing snapshots and manually maintaining the legacy product . With Cohesity , Pilot has recouped nearly 780 hours of productivity a year across these teams . When it comes to backup and recovery there are clear benefits as well . Before Cohesity , backing up one Exchange Server VM would take two to three days .
“ Cohesity cut that time to an hour or two for our entire environment ,” said Hankins . “ Peace of mind is also a big benefit of Cohesity . It just works , and if something does happen , I typically get an email notifying me that a support case was opened and closed before I knew about the problem . The support is excellent .”
Cohesity also reduced Pilot ’ s on-premises data center footprint as well as energy costs by roughly US $ 2,000 per rack per month for three racks of the old NAS solution , for a total of US $ 6,000 per month savings . Moreover , archiving to Google Cloud Platform through Cohesity is considerably more affordable than tape alternatives . p
Pilot added cloud archiving for backups less than a year after adopting Cohesity for modern file and object services . Now Pilot stores primary application data in Pure and periodically archives from Cohesity to Google Cloud Platform , enabling IT to eliminate offsite tape storage while enjoying scalable , cheaper and more efficient management . The team expects to enable Disaster Recovery in the cloud through Cohesity too .
PEACE OF MIND IS ALSO A BIG BENEFIT OF COHESITY .
IT JUST WORKS .
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