Riverbed SteelStore Helps Australian Home Builder Metricon Backup Data to Cloud

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced that Metricon Corporation, one of the largest new home builders in Australia, is using its SteelStore (formerly Whitewater) cloud storage gateway products to gain control of the growing volumes of data that need to be backed up and available for recovery.

For Metricon, SteelStore has reduced storage costs and volumes by 80%, shrunk data transfer times by weeks, and saved $28,000 annually on tape costs alone, as well as saved the company more than 400 hours annually that used to be spent backing up to tape. With its data stored in Microsoft Azure, Metricon has also improved the reliability and accessibility of document backups.

Established in 1976 with its head office in Melbourne, Metricon is a large residential homebuilder in Australia, building thousands of homes each year.

To run a national, multi-office operation, keep mobile employees productive, boost employee efficiency and protect business data, Metricon’ s IT group continually looks for the latest technology solutions. Backups are a critical part of Metricon’ s Melbourne data center resiliency strategy, but were consuming the IT staff s time, budget and peace of mind. In addition to home warranties, Metricon must keep copies of contracts and other documents on file for seven years to meet legal requirements. In 2014, after almost 40 years in business, the company had accumulated nearly 40TB of data that it backed up to tapes and moved offsite for safekeeping. By early 2014, George Chen, server engineer in the Metricon IT group, and a colleague were spending 10 hours a week managing backups. And, if employees needed access to an archived file, it took hours to retrieve.

“Our infrastructure team is not very big and backups were becoming a big time drain,” said Chen. ‘They were taking time away from other maintenance tasks and from managing and improving our business-critical systems. Also, the integrity of tape backups was a concern. Our homes come with 25-year warranties, so we keep our backup tapes for decades. Tapes and tape drives break we need to ensure that we have warranties and other documents on hand if our customers need them.“