“The Data Domain Restorer offers our clients unique advantages over more conventional disk-based solutions.” — Jaime Gmach
President
Evolving Solutions

This oil and gas company is a conventional oil and gas income trust engaged in the acquisition, development, and production of oil and natural gas. With an enterprise value of approximately $2.2 billion, the company has maintained a perfect distribution record since its inception, with separate operations for crude oil and natural gas, each of which constitutes an extensive portfolio of operated properties and development prospects.

Huge Savings and Greater Control

The Data Domain DD560g gateway has enabled the company to leverage their existing storage investment and to achieve huge savings in disk costs and power consumption, as well as space savings in the data center. Data Domain deduplication technology has restored control over storage growth and even enabled the company to forestall an expensive data center expansion. Plus, tight integration between Data Domain and Vizioncore backup software has simplified management and greatly reduced management overhead.

Customer Challenges

Like any enterprise, the oil and gas company faced the challenge of backing up greater and greater data volumes and managing expanding backup windows. Legacy tape systems presented the classic issues of jammed tapes, drive failures, breakdowns, and so on. The senior IT analyst with the oil and gas company, explains, “Tape just has a lot of problems. We’ve been through three different kinds of tape libraries and they all ended up having the same kinds of issues. Tape systems are pretty expensive and there’s a lot of maintenance involved.”

The restore process was also slow and complicated. The senior IT analyst explains, “We had to use a series of scripts to do restores. So, if a client needed something restored and we didn’t have it online it would take a long time to fulfill the request.” He notes, “With backups taking longer, slow restores, and all the costs and problems with tape, we were motivated to go to disk-based backup.”

After making the move to disk-based backup, the oil and gas company was making heavy use of an EMC system, but with a linear relationship between backup and disk growth, keeping up with storage demands was getting to be expensive. According to the senior IT analyst “We have to hold onto data for longer and longer periods, so our existing storage system was filling up quickly. When we looked ahead we just saw the constant need to keep adding more storage shelves and eventually more racks, all of which are expensive and require floor space, power, cooling, and so on. In fact, because of physical limitations in the data center we couldn’t have grown the system as much as we would have needed without sacrificing data retention.”

Data Domain Solution

With the significant cost of maintaining the existing disk-based backup system, deduplication technology became an attractive option. The senior IT analyst recounts, “I heard about deduplication technology from a colleague. We looked into it and decided to try it out.” He also recalls, “We looked at EMC’s deduplication but it was too risky for us; we also did some comparing and weren’t convinced we’d get very good compression out of the EMC product. On the other hand, Data Domain had been out there a lot longer with working systems and proven compression rates.”

The oil and gas company deployed a Data Domain DD560g gateway system, which enables them to make use of existing storage systems. They also use Legato NetWorker backup software and Vizioncore vRangerPro software to manage backups in their virtual server environment, which consists of over 80 virtual servers. The senior IT analyst explains, “The Data Domain system holds all our daily and weekly backups, including Oracle databases, SQL databases, physical servers, virtual servers, everything.”

The oil and gas company has seen exceptional deduplication rates with the Data Domain system. The senior IT analyst notes, ““We were very impressed with the compression rates. Right now, our total backup is at 110TB, but with deduplication that only appears as 7TB. That’s a huge savings and it will keep getting better with time. We’re seeing about 16x compression overall and better than 30x compression in our virtual server environments.”

Business Benefits

With high rates of data reduction, The oil and gas company has saved money on a range of fronts. The oil and gas company says, “Data Domain is saving us a lot in money, space, power, cooling, and so on because we’re able to get so much more data onto less disk. Plus, with deduplication we’re able to retain data a lot longer than we could before.”

The Data Domain inline deduplication storage system has also enabled the oil and gas company to leverage their existing storage investment. The senior IT analyst says, “In response to data growth, we had already purchased a lot of disks. Now we’re using the same disks as before but a lot less of them.” He even adds, “I would consider this a “green” product: being able to reduce the number of spinning disks in our environment has meant a huge reduction in power consumption, which is an important factor in a green package.”

Operationally, Data Domain has simplified management and relieved pressure in the data center. “With deduplication we’re not having to grow the system as often. In fact, the Data Domain system gave us more control over our data center expansion, which we were able to forestall; we’re still proceeding with the expansion but on our own terms.”

The automation and simplicity of the new systems has produced tangible benefits. According to the senior IT analyst “The integration and backup process with Data Domain and Vizioncore vRangerPro is great: after setting it up all I have to do is look at the reports it generates. The whole thing works automatically and it saves me a lot of management time.” With regard to restores, the senior IT analyst adds, “With the old system, doing restores required a series of scripts and lots of editing, which I had to do myself, but with Data Domain and Vizioncore, anyone on the team can do quick drag-and-drop, point-and-click restores.”

The oil and gas company is extremely satisfied with the Data Domain system. The senior IT analyst remarks, “When I find a product that works as well and as easily as was promised, I always recommend it very highly and that’s how I feel about the Data Domain DD560g. We’re getting huge amounts of data backed up now, we’re getting it in a timely fashion, plus we’re saving on all fronts: disk costs, power, cooling, space requirements, and so on, all across the board.” As the oil and gas company IT environment continues to evolve, the senior IT analyst is optimistic about how his organization will be able to use the Data Domain deduplication storage system in the future. “We’ll definitely be looking at additional ways to use the Data Domain system to get even more use out it, such as archiving.”


“When I find a product that works as well and as easily as was promised, I always recommend it very highly and that’s how I feel about the Data Domain DD560g. We’re getting huge amounts of data backed up now, we’re getting it in a timely fashion, plus we’re saving on all fronts: disk costs, power, cooling and space requirements.”

Senior IT Analyst
Oil & Gas Company