Retailer True Alliance in Australia and New Zealand Deploys Cohesity With AWS

Cohesity, Inc. announced that True Alliance Corporate Services Pty Ltd, an omni-channel retail company operating across Australia and New Zealand, has reduced its backup cost and complexity with the deployment of its coupled with storage capacity provided by the AWS Glacier service.

The deployment follows the company’s decision to better support its ongoing business growth by managing around 45TB of data, including customer and sales records, high-quality digital images, and video used in marketing campaigns.

“We had reached the stage where the weekend wasn’t long enough to complete a full backup of all our servers,” says Aiden Ichsan, network engineer, True Alliance. “We were finding we had to do some backups during the week and even some during the working day, which wasn’t ideal. This caused some network congestion issues and created some problems for other parts of the business.“

True Alliance had previously been relying on Veritas Backup Exec infrastructure which stored data in 3 IBM tape libraries. This system had been in place for around five years and was proving increasingly difficult to manage and maintain.

The company subsequently reviewed its options and sought a solution that would reduce backup times, optimise IT productivity, and increase operational efficiencies. The organisation also wanted to adopt a backup and recovery solution that would simplify management, slash TCO, provide integration to the cloud and create a scalable platform to accommodate future data growth.

After evaluating a range of options, a decision was taken to deploy a Cohesity-based solution with storage capacity provided by the AWS Glacier service.

“With Cohesity, you have a solution that just does it all for you and that removes much of the complexity,” said Ichsan. “When you add the flexibility and reliability of Amazon Glacier, the solution becomes even more compelling.“

During what ended up being a very rapid deployment, support was provided by technology partner Agile Business Technologies Pty Ltd. The native cloud integration capability offered by Cohesity made the initial deployment and ongoing management straightforward.

“Backups tend to be a massive time sink and our Cohesity solution has now dramatically cut the amount of staff time needed to manage our backup processes,” said Ichsan. “Where it used to take 10 hours a week to maintain backups, now it takes virtually no time at all.“

The True Alliance IT team has also managed to increase overall backup retention. As there is no longer a reliance on physical tapes, it’s possible to increase the storage capacity being used in the Amazon cloud. This capacity can continue to grow as needs evolve over time.

Associated costs have also been reduced as True Alliance pays less for storage than what it was costing to manage tape libraries.

“We have halved our monthly backup storage costs compared with the previous tape-based solution,” said Ichsan.

A further benefit comes from the ability to initiate backups more regularly. Previously these were completed daily or weekly depending on the system, whereas data can be backed up every four hours. This ensures all files are consistently protected and ready to be restored if required.

“For us, backup has changed from being a massive pain to something that just happens in the background,” said Ichsan. “Thanks to the combination of Cohesity and AWS, we now have in place an infrastructure that can support our current activity and grow with us in the future.“