Financial Giant Invests in Deduplication Appliance

SunGard Financial Services was experiencing backup woes in its highly virtualized environment. Using tape along with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and Symantec Backup Exec was proving problematic. As reported in this Enterprise IT Planet story, the company looked at various options as an alternative to tape, including storing data on SATA disks within a SAN. Eventually, however, it switched to EMC Data Domain for deduplication and Symantec NetBackup software. Some backup remains on tape, but much of it has switched to the Data Domain appliance.

---

"SunGard Financial Services is one of the four business units of SunGard. While SunGard Availability Services is perhaps better known due to its disaster recovery services, SunGard Financial Services is actually a larger revenue generator. It contributes more than 50 percent of the annual $5 billion-plus of SunGard by delivering software and IT services to institutions in virtually every segment of the financial services industry.

"Based in London, but with global operations, the data center of SunGard Financial Services uses EMC Clariion and Celerra arrays in its SAN. It currently has 1,500 virtual machines (VMs) distributed across eight sites. Most of these VMs operate in a development and test environment. When it came to backing them, the inadequacies of VCB meant that priorities had to be set. Those VMs operating in a mission-critical production setting were always backed up. Those in development and testing, however, were not. Chapman describes a 'kit of parts' being needed to build VCB backup. Despite a lot of attention, backup jobs would fail."

Read the Full "Financial Giant Uses Deduplication to Reduce Virtual Storage Costs" Story at Enterprise IT Planet