Tipper Tie - Riverbed

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CASE STUDY

IN BRIEF Industry

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Manufacturing

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Inconsistent backup practices across facilities Difficulty with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance

Tipper Tie has a global workforce of 350 people. In addition to its headquarters in Apex, North Carolina, the company has offices in Europe and is expanding into Brazil, China, and Kazakhstan.

Two-person IT staff spends too much time managing tape backups

Challenge: Inconsistent, time-consuming and expensive tape back up processes

Solution

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Whitewater 510 appliances at four production sites Amazon S3 cloud storage

Benefits

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Whitewater delivers a solid DR strategy at $107,000 lower cost than tape Tipper Tie, Inc., part of Dover Corp., manufactures of food processing and packaging machinery. It would be hard to find a refrigerator case anywhere in the developed world that does not include foods processed or packaged with Tipper Tie’s products.

Challenges

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Tipper Tie

Saved $107,000 over three years compared to tape backup Saved 936 man-hours over three years Restores in 15 minutes versus 8 hours with tape Improves SOX compliance Effective DR strategy No extra cost for business continuity plan

Tipper Tie’s four production facilities are located in North Carolina, Switzerland, and Germany. Historically, each site operated independently and this was true of backup practices. Although each site used some form of tape backup, there was no consistency in terms of the hardware and software used or the practices followed. “We had no centralized plan and no standardization, and this was always an issue with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) audits,” says Drew Bartow, senior IT engineer at Tipper Tie. Another problem, which Bartow could see clearly in the North Carolina facility, were the limitations of tape backup in general. That facility had a seven-tape library with a single linear tape-open (LTO) drive. At nearly five years old, the hardware needed to be upgraded. Tapes were picked up and stored off-site by a tape vaulting service, which was another expense. Also, average time for a full backup was 72 hours. This was not a problem on a Friday, but when the end of month fell mid-week and someone needed a file restored during the end-of-month backup, Bartow either had to stop the job or delay the restore. Bartow conducted exhaustive research for a better backup approach that could be standardized across the production sites. In addition to written documentation and sales presentations from numerous vendors, Bartow had the experience of the other Dover operating companies to guide him. A number of those companies were using backup-todisk (B2D) solutions, so he test-drove some of “I can’t say enough about the those. “I saw a number of problems with that technical support we have approach,” Bartow explains. “First, they didn’t dedupe data very well. Second, there were huge received from Riverbed throughupfront costs. It would have cost us $200,000 to out this process.” deploy B2D across our four sites. That’s difficult to justify, and didn’t include the maintenance and licensing costs every year. Third, it would require complex installations and a steep learning curve, and our two-person IT staff didn’t have time for that.”

Solution: Whitewater 510 and Amazon S3 One Dover company, Pump Solutions Group, recommended a different approach – storing data in the cloud, using a Whitewater® cloud storage appliance from Riverbed Technology. “They basically said to me, ‘Why wouldn’t you do this?’” says Bartow. “When I saw how pleased PSG was with Whitewater, and how inexpensive cloud storage was, it made sense to give the Whitewater appliance a try.” The simplicity of this solution compared to B2D was something Bartow noticed immediately. “It took longer to find screws for the brackets to mount it in the server rack than to get the Whitewater appliance up and running,” he says of the 15-minute installation process. “The appliance integrated seamlessly into our Symantec Backup Exec software. We simply added it as a target, set parameters such as how many concurrent jobs we wanted run, how to back up the files, and so on, and we were done.”

CASE STUDY: Tipper Tie

Bartow found the clear documentation provided by Riverbed® to be helpful. “Riverbed has very simple, streamlined guides regarding set up, installation, and best practices,” he notes. While the ease of installation was attractive, a few other factors also played into Bartow’s decision to deploy Whitewater appliances across the organization. One is Riverbed’s flexible licensing structure. “When we asked B2D vendors what we do when we need more space, they just said, ‘Add another shelf.’ That would cost $35,000 per site,” he explains. “With Whitewater, we wouldn’t need a new appliance. It will grow and scale with us as we just adjust the licensing.” Another factor in Riverbed’s favor was its excellent support. “I can’t say enough about the technical support we have received from Riverbed throughout this process,” Bartow says. Tipper Tie deployed four Whitewater 510 appliances, one at each production facility. Each is connected to a Backup Exec VM media server. For cloud storage, the company uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). In the North Carolina facility, 26.97 terabytes of backup data have been sent to Whitewater appliance to date. Only 2.21 terabytes have gone to the Amazon cloud, representing a deduplication rate for the appliance of 12.23x.

Benefits: Cost and time savings, business continuity at no extra cost

“When I saw how pleased PSG was with Whitewater, and how inexpensive cloud storage was, it made sense to give the Whitewater appliance a try.”

If Tipper Tie had implemented a common tape backup solution at the four production facilities, Bartow estimates that it would have cost the company $154,842 over three years. (That figure includes a new server and new tape library at each site, along with enough tapes for 30-day rotation, maintenance, licenses, and support.) In contrast, the cost of the Whitewater solution over three years will be $75,816 – a savings of nearly $80,000. That figure could be somewhat higher since these calculations don’t include the elimination of the tape storage fee.

The Whitewater solution brings significant labor savings as well. Bartow has determined that basic tape administration would require 1,170 hours over three years. Whitewater will require only 234 hours in three years. The difference (936 hours) represents a savings for the company of $28,080. These figures don’t include the time Bartow and his colleague save on an on-going basis when they restore files. To illustrate, Bartow tells of a time when he needed to restore 20 gigabytes of files for a legal matter. He got the request while at home, at night. Since this material had been stored after the Whitewater deployment, Bartow was able to deliver that information in 15 minutes, working from his Apple iPad. Later that night, he was asked for a similar amount of information that had been backed up earlier to tape. He had to go into the office and track down the right tapes, mount them, then perform the restores – a process that took seven hours. The most common scenario for a restore involves a file that is still in the Whitewater cache, which is available almost instantly. “The one time we had to pull something from the cloud, it took about 20 minutes,” Bartow says. The Whitewater solution has given Tipper Tie an affordable and easily managed backup process that meets SOX standards as well as Tipper Tie’s global IT mandate to “Simply, Standardize, and Reduce.” Tipper Tie’s IT director, as well as Dover’s Corporate Compliance IT director, had no concerns about cloud backup once he learned that the data is fully encrypted at rest within the cloud and during transmission by the Whitewater appliance, and Amazon encrypts the data at rest and has SSAE-16, as well as FIPS 140-2 certification.

“It took longer to find screws for the brackets than to get the Whitewater appliance up and running.”

With Whitewater, Tipper Tie now has a solid disaster recovery (DR) strategy. But there is another benefit of Whitewater that Bartow says he was not expecting when he purchased the appliances. With the purchase of a physical appliance comes a virtual appliance license. “You store that in Amazon, or at your remote

site or cold site and you’ve just written your business continuity plan without having to buy twin appliances (one for the cold site and one for the hot site),” he explains. “How many tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars does that save? It’s really nice to be able to go to your manager and say, ‘I’ve written a business continuity plan for us, and it didn’t cost anything.’” Tipper Tie is now testing a Whitewater 3010 with Amazon’s lower-cost storage service, Glacier. Bartow believes this could be a very good option for his company for data that is unlikely to be restored. “Hot stuff, such as 30-day rotation data, we will keep in Amazon S3,” he explains. “But the information that sits in storage permanently and probably won’t be called back will be sent to Glacier.” The savings will be substantial. For example, it costs Tipper Tie two hundred dollars now to store “It’s really nice to be able to go to end-of-month data in Amazon S3. It costs your manager and say, ‘I’ve writ$11 to store that same data in Glacier. That savings, multiplied by four sites, adds up to ten a business continuity plan for approximately $9,000 annually. The Whitewater us, and it didn’t cost us anything.” 3010 appliance contributes to the savings by deduplicating the data. During beta testing, Tipper Tie is seeing a deduplication rate of 7.52x, meaning that of the 11 terabytes of data that has been sent to the appliance, only 1.4 terabytes has been sent to Amazon Glacier.

SUMMARY Although each of Tipper Tie’s four production sites previously used some form of tape backup, there was no consistency in terms of the hardware and software used or the practices followed. In addition to causing problems with SOX audits, backing up to tape was proving to be costly and not fast enough to complete full backups when they had to be done mid-month. The company considered replacing the tape and standardizing on a backupto-disk system but found that option to be very expensive ($200,000) to deploy across four sites. And when the company eventually needed more space, it would cost another $35,000 per site. Also, B2D systems’ deduplication functionality is limited, and the installation would have been more than the company’s twoperson IT team had time for. Whitewater cloud storage appliances, in conjunction with Amazon S3 service, offered a more affordable approach that has turned out to have numerous other advantages as well. Tipper Tie installed a Whitewater appliance at all four production sites, at a cost of only $75,816 over three years. (This represents a savings of nearly $80,000 compared to upgrading and standardizing on a tape system, which was another option the company considered.) Managing the Whitewater appliances takes so much less time compared to tape (936 fewer hours over three years) that the company is avoiding $28,080 in labor costs over that timeframe. The appliances’ deduplication rate of more than 12x holds down the cost of cloud storage. In one facility, 26.97 terabytes of backup data have been sent to Whitewater appliance, while only 2.21 terabytes have gone to the Amazon cloud. Restores now happen in 15 minutes versus an eight-hour turnaround with tape. The Whitewater solution also gives Tipper Tie a consistent backup process across its global operations and a solid DR strategy.

About Riverbed Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.

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