EMC Backup and Recovery

Solutions for VMware:

Customer Success Profiles

The customers in this compilation all share one

common story: They turned to EMC solutions to address
the backup and recovery challenges they faced while
implementing a virtualized server environment.

VMware® is the universally recognized approach for

cost-effectively managing and deploying virtual servers.
It reduces costs and simplifies data and application
management. However, traditional tape- and
disk-based data protection methods can no longer
keep pace with the amount of data or the unique
challenges inherent in virtualized environments.

EMC backup and recovery solutions provide industry-

leading deduplication storage and software solutions,
along with backup management and reporting tools to
help you fully realize the benefits of virtualization.

The Big Picture
Server Consolidation is Only Half the Job
• VMware is a top IT strategy for simplified
management and cost-efficiencies
• Backup bottlenecks tax network and
storage resources
• EMC provides an integrated, VMware-
certified portfolio of backup solutions
Redesign Your Backup to Complete the Job
• Consolidate server backup and archive
data to a single storage system for
fully-optimized virtualization
• Deduplication enables massive data
reduction for longer retention and
tape-free disaster recovery
• Accelerate VMware backups by 90 percent
• Slash VMware backup storage capacity
requirements
• Advanced virtual machine and
application-level consistent backup
• Simplify data management
• Recover data reliably with advanced
levels of disk and data integrity
“EMC is the clear leader in disk-based backup
systems and software.”
Brian Babineau
Sr. Consulting Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
January 2010
2
Next-generation virtual machine backup and
restore for VMware environments
Server consolidation is only half the job.
Virtualization is a top IT strategy for one simple reason: business value. A fully virtualized data center
brings simplicity and cost efficiencies to new heights. And it positions your IT infrastructure to quickly
support the capabilities and scalability you need to keep your business agile and competitive.
VMware servers consolidate production workloads well, but backups create bottlenecks that tax
network and storage resources. The benefits of virtualization cannot be fully realized without disk-
and network-optimized backup and replication methods. Maximizing ROI for virtualized envrionments
requires a redesign of the entire IT stack — including and perhaps most importantly — backup.
EMC’s integrated, VMware-certified portfolio of backup solutions helps you speed VMware server
backups, improve production environment performance, and enhance information protection for your
critical VMware application environments.
Redesign your backup to complete the job.
EMC® backup and recovery solutions for VMware consolidate server backup and archive data as
well as disastar recovery processes to a single storage system for fully-optimized server and storage
virtualization.
VMware backup images are highly redundant and are therefore a “sweet spot” for data deduplica-
tion. High-speed, inline deduplication removes redundant data at a granular, variable-length
level — before it is saved to disk — resulting in a backup dataset that requires 40-60x less disk
storage. You can save backups on disk and on site longer, and send the data offsite faster with
minimal bandwidth usage, without the costs and risks associated with tapes and trucks.
With EMC backup and recovery solutions for VMware, you can address the unique backup challenges
that come with virtualization:
• Improve backup speeds by up to 90 percent
• Increase server consolidation ratios by up to 50 percent
• Retain backups onsite longer with 40-60x less disk for fast operational recoveries
• Replicate data offsite faster with 99 percent bandwidth efficiency for tape-free disaster recovery
• Recover data reliably with advanced levels of disk and data integrity
 cu stom e r p r of i le
Challenges
• Annual storage growth of 40-50 percent
• Administration and increasing costs of
tape for backup and offsite storage
• Increasing backup windows and difficul-
ties in meeting recovery time objectives
Results
• Complete elimination of tape has
saved significant costs and met 3-year
ROI objectives
• Deduplication storage has reduced
physical capacity requirements by
99 percent
• Automated and centralized backup,
recovery, and DR processes
• Achieved recovery time objectives to
meet stringent audit requirements
Boston Medical Center
Deploying deduplication and virtualization for
best-of-breed data protection
Boston Medical Center (BMC) excels in providing consistently accessible health services to its
patients. BMC’s mission is to provide “Exceptional care without exception.” The IT infrastructure
and systems that support these services play an important role in ensuring that hospital staff can
work as effectively and efficiently as possible without worrying about the systems. It is essential that
data is fully protected and recoverable to meet internal SLAs, state, federal, and HIPAA regulatory
requirements. This places a unique requirement on the storage infrastructure, with reliability and
performance a top priority.
Managing growth of storage and costs
With more than 550 physical servers and over 400 TB of critical data to protect, BMC’s legacy
infrastructure was struggling to cope. There were a number of ongoing challenges that impacted the
effective management of BMC’s backup and recovery processes, including the daily administration
burden on the IT team as well as performance and reliability concerns. In particular, backup windows
were difficult to meet, and recoveries from tape were slow and resource intensive.
“As a non-profit, our goal is to always maintain or lower operating costs. Yet relying on our existing
conventional disk and tape storage infrastructure was not cost-effective, it couldn’t keep pace and we
were grappling with support issues across multiple vendors,” explained Brad Blake, Chief Technology
Officer for Boston Medical Center. “We were spending upwards of $70,000 a year on tape media and
administration. With support contract renewals also looming, I realized that adding onto this existing
infrastructure was not moving us forward strategically.”
With data growth continuing at a rate of 40 to 50 percent per year, BMC’s IT team needed to move
forward in designing a next-generation data protection infrastructure. A critical part of this plan was
finding a solution that could handle the storage requirements introduced by BMC’s server virtualiza-
tion initiative with VMware®, which was happening concurrently. As a complement of the team’s goal
to virtualize 360 servers over a three year period, BMC took this opportunity to also redesign and
improve its storage foundation.
Backup redesign delivers tangible business benefits
BMC defined the following goals for its new storage infrastructure: improve overall performance and
reliability; ensure capacity to handle growth; implement consistent standards and processes across
data centers; improve disaster recovery (DR) capabilities and recovery time objectives (RTO); improve
speed and reliability of backups and restores; and reduce the administrative burden.
To meet these requirements BMC’s team chose and deployed EMC® Data Domain® deduplication
storage managed through its EMC NetWorker environment. Equipped with two EMC Data Domain
DD690 systems, one located at the primary data center and the other residing at its hot DR site, BMC
is now able to replicate data bi-directionally to ensure comprehensive data protection. Data Domain
deduplication storage has delivered massive data reduction of its virtualized systems, allowing BMC
EMC Backup and Recovery Solutions
• EMC Data Domain DD600 Series deduplication
storage systems
• EMC Data Domain Replicator software
• EMC NetWorker® backup software
• VMware ESX® server virtualization solution
to compress 350 TB of backups down to 3.5 TB (99 percent reduction). BMC now relies entirely on
Data Domain for its backup and recovery processes and has completely eliminated tape. This move
is saving BMC more than $40,000 per year on tape storage, $20,000 per year on tape media and
$10,000 per year on tape swapping and administration.
Additionally, by virtualizing its server infrastructure with VMware, BMC has reduced data center
space, cooling and power requirements by 40 percent and has retired or repurposed 130 physical
servers to-date. VMware allowed BMC to automatically allocate server resources to the hosts that
need them and has provided much faster and efficient server provisioning.

Architecting a strategic approach to data protection with best of breed deduplication storage
technology and server virtualization has enabled BMC to achieve its vision of an automated and
centralized backup and recovery process. The benefits are considerable. Not only has BMC
streamlined its entire backup and recovery environment and reduced the administrative burden,
it has also greatly enhanced its business continuity capabilities and reduced power, space and
cooling costs across the data center.

“Our three-year EMC Data Domain ROI was focused on

reducing operating and administration expenses while
increasing capacity and throughput. Data Domain has helped
us achieve these goals by streamlining our backup, disaster
recovery, and archive processes.”
Brad Blake, Chief Technology Officer, Boston Medical Center

Importantly, BMC is subject to very stringent RTO policies; the EMC Data Domain solution provides a
clear and automated process that demonstrates to auditors that the RTO of just hours can be met.

“Our three year EMC Data Domain ROI was focused on reducing operating and administration
expenses while increasing capacity and throughput. Data Domain has helped us achieve these goals
by streamlining our backup, disaster recovery, and archive processes,” concludes Blake.
 cu stom e r p r of i le

Brown-Forman

Protecting data at 31 sites worldwide with centrally

managed backup and recovery
Business overview
Brown-Forman is one of the largest American-owned spirits and wine companies and among the
top 10 largest global spirits companies. The company globally markets and sells various categories
Benefits
of alcoholic beverage products, such as Tennessee, Canadian, and Kentucky whiskies, Kentucky
• Provides central management of backup and
bourbons, California sparkling wine, tequila, table wine, liqueurs, vodka, rum, and ready-to-drink
recovery for remote sites worldwide
products. Brown-Forman sells 37 brands in more than 135 countries and has offices in cities across the
• Backs up remote site data in minutes, rather
globe. Employing 3,750 people worldwide, the company had sales of $2.4 billion in fiscal 2006.
than hours—at success rates near 100 percent
• Restores data at international sites within
minutes or hours, as opposed to days
Challenges
In addition to its headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, Brown-Forman has remote sites across the
• Significantly reduces cost of backup and
recovery by eliminating tapes
United States and in 24 other countries. The company had to rely on staff at each of these sites to
regularly backup site data to tape drives, and, when necessary, restore data from the tapes.
• Slashes administrative time required to manage
backups and recover data
Little control over backup at remote sites
“With tape backup, we had very little control over how well data at our remote sites was being
protected,” says Greg Tinnell, a senior IT manager at Brown-Forman. “Remote office personnel would
forget to swap tapes, or be out of the office sick or on vacation. Also, site data started outgrowing the
capacity of a single tape, forcing them to exclude data.” As a result, the company’s backup success rate
was only 75 to 80 percent, with some sites averaging less than 40 percent.

Incomplete backups hindered Brown-Forman IT group’s ability to restore data when needed. Differing
time zones also hampered data recovery, especially at overseas sites. For instance, if a recovery request
was submitted from the Seoul site at 3 pm (1 am in Louisville), the Korean site most likely wouldn’t get a
response until after its work day was over. The Brown-Forman IT administrator would leave instructions
for someone at the site to find the correct tape and put it in the tape drive. After that was done, the
administrator could run a recovery process from headquarters. With the time difference between sites
and other hiccups in the recovery process, it could take several days to complete a recovery job.

International sites need data stored offsite daily

To ensure data availability in the event of a natural or manmade disaster, such as an act of terrorism,
the company mandated that all international sites store daily backups offsite. “In the process of
investigating third-party vendors to store backed up data, we quickly realized that the cost and effort
to initiate and then maintain contracts with delivery and storage suppliers in each country was going
to be enormous,” says Tinnell.

Business profile
Brown-Forman
One of the largest American-owned
spirits and wine companies
Industry
Food and beverage
Geographies
Headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky,
with offices and partners in 137
countries
Business solution
Data backup and recovery
EMC products
EMC Avamar, EMC Avamar Virtual
Edition, VMware
Deployment summary
EMC Avamar centrally backups up 4.5
terabytes of data on 41 servers at 31
remote sites worldwide. EMC Avamar
Virtual Edition and VMware will back
up data at a newly acquired company
with multiple sites.
EMC partners
EMC Professional Services
In addition, Brown-Forman wanted to reduce the administrative overhead associated with backup and
recovery. The company’s tape backup-and-recovery solution required one person at headquarters to
log into every remote server each day to make changes to backup schedules, restore data, or check to
make sure its backup was successful. If a backup wasn’t successful, the administrator had to follow up
with the site. He and others in IT also had to deal with stuck tapes, tape failures, and so on.
EMC solution
To centralize management of backup and recovery for its remote sites and to enable efficient offsite
data replication, Brown-Forman turned to EMC® Avamar®, a backup and recovery solution with
patented global data de-duplication technology to identify redundant data segments at the source,
reducing daily backup data by up to 500 times before it is transferred across the network and stored to
disk. “The patented de-duplication technology in EMC Avamar is what really sold us,” says Tinnell. “All
of our sites have limited bandwidth so the less data we need to send over the network, the better.”
Avamar software agents on 42 servers at 31 remote locations enable Brown-Forman to protect their
combined 4.5 terabytes of data with no additional remote hardware required. Data from these sites
is backed up directly over the company’s existing WAN connections to a central Avamar server at
headquarters in Louisville.
An onsite EMC technician installed the Avamar software without having to leave Brown-Forman
headquarters. He also helped migrate remote site data from tapes to Avamar, a task that took two
months. “In our remote sites, we had a wide range of tape drives and many different versions of backup
software so the initial migration was more time consuming than we expected,” explains Tinnell.
The EMC technician also helped with the changeover from tape to Avamar, and, based on time zone
calculations and charting new backup times, determined when to schedule backup windows for each
of the 42 remote servers. “We were so busy with day-to-day operations that having the EMC technician
managing the bulk of the work was a huge benefit,” notes Tinnell.
Backups in minutes as opposed to hours
“With EMC Avamar and its de-duplication technology, the average run times of our backups have been
reduced to minutes as opposed to hours,” says Tinnell. “That’s because the rate of change for the data
that must traverse our network at backup time—that is, all data that has changed or is new—is typically
less than one percent of the total that we used to have to backup.”
Backup success rates near 100%
With EMC Avamar, backups are now 97 percent to 100 percent successful, up from 75 to 80 percent.
If there is a failure—for instance, if a network connection failed—running the backup during the day
is usually not a problem. The backups typically take so little time that they have virtually no impact on
network bandwidth.
Reducing costs and administrative overhead
“Half the cost to deploy a server at a remote site is the tapes, tape drives, and backup software
associated with it,” says Tinnell. “With EMC Avamar, we’ve eliminated those costs entirely, significantly
reducing the cost of backup and recovery at remote facilities.”
 In addition to eliminating costs associated with tape backup hardware and software, EMC Avamar
frees up IT resource time significantly. The solution’s centralized web-based management and
at-a-glance dashboard view make it easy to view, from a single location, the backup status at all
remote offices. And because Avamar verifies the recoverability of all backup data daily, there are no
surprises. Consequently, the administrator who used to have to spend hours each day checking on
backup status now spends only a fraction of the time monitoring backups.

“Half the cost to deploy a server at a remote site is the tapes, tape
drives, and backup software associated with it. With EMC Avamar,
we’ve eliminated those costs entirely, significantly reducing the
cost of backup and recovery at remote facilities.”
Greg Tinnell, Manager, Storage Management

Data at international sites restored in minutes or hours rather than days

When backed up data does need to be recovered, Brown-Forman IT now spends hours or days less
time restoring it. Unlike the previous tape backup solution, Avamar provides Brown-Forman with
daily full backups that can be quickly recovered in just one step.

“Before Avamar, it could take us three days to restore a single file for an international site because
of the time difference, human error, or problems with the backup software,” says Tinnell. “Today,
however, whenever a recovery request comes in, remote site personnel don’t need to do anything
and we can usually restore their data within minutes—or within hours for the most remote sites with
poorer quality network connections—rather than days.”

Cost-effective backup for newly acquired company using virtual machines

At its newly acquired tequila company, Casa Herradura, Brown-Forman was planning to implement
VMware to consolidate servers and reduce operating costs. “The introduction of EMC Avamar Virtual
Edition could not have come at a better time for us,” says Tinnell. “With VMware and Avamar
Virtual Edition, we can cost-effectively backup Casa Herradura’s satellite offices to their main
facility, then replicate all that data back to headquarters and store it offsite.” Without Avamar and
its de-duplication technology, backups of the tequila company’s sites would have overburdened
network bandwidth, especially in a virtualized environment where backups share the same
underlying hardware resources.

Summary
EMC Avamar and VMware enable Brown-Forman to centrally manage backup and recovery for its 42
remote servers worldwide—with minimal impact on the company’s WAN—and immediately store data
offsite. In addition, remote-site backups typically take minutes instead of hours, and restorations
take only minutes or hours, as opposed to days. Furthermore, replacing tape backup with the Avamar
solution has eliminated the current and future costs and administrative time associated with backing
up remote sites to tape.
 cu stom e r p r of i le
Challenges
• Insufficient storage resources to sup-
port virtualized environment
• Secure and efficient transfer of backups
over 100 MB link to DR site
• Legacy storage infrastructure unable to
leverage cost and management benefits
of virtualization
Results
• Efficient and scalable deduplication
storage averaging 38:1 reduction
across all data sets
• Reduced costs and administration
through elimination of tape
• Optimized backups and management
of server virtualization infrastructure
• Simplified and reliable DR processes
utilizing existing WAN links and
with greatly improved recovery time
objectives
Generali International
Optimizing protection of VMware virtual
infrastructure
Generali International is part of Assicurazioni Generali S.p.A (the Generali Group), which has the
benefit of over 175 years of experience in providing savings and investment solutions for a wide
variety of investment needs. As one of the world’s top 50 companies, the Generali Group has a global
presence, operating in some 40 markets covering five continents. Operating autonomously, Generali
International is headquartered in Guernsey, a tax-neutral international finance center that is
regulated by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission.
With a modern and flexible approach to insurance services, Generali International has adopted a
similar approach to its IT infrastructure, looking for best-of-breed technology solutions to deliver cost
efficiencies and measurable value to the business. Having committed to a strategic virtualization
initiative, Generali turned to EMC Data Domain deduplication storage as the backbone to redesign
its backup and disaster recovery (DR) processes including Data Domain Replicator software to
improve the cost efficiencies of its storage infrastructure and fully leverage the benefits gained
from virtualization.
Protection of virtual machines presents challenges
The Generali International primary data center is located at the company headquarters in Guernsey,
with the DR site situated two miles away. The two sites are connected by a 100 megabyte link. All
of the primary applications used by Generali are hosted at this data center, which is also connected
via a WAN to branch offices in Ireland, Cyprus, Zurich and Hong Kong. Business continuity is of
paramount importance at Generali, and the organization maintains an exact mirror of the production
site at the DR site with different levels of synchronization tiered according to the criticality of each
data set.
Looking to enhance business continuity capabilities, the Generali IT team embarked upon a virtual-
ization initiative. The scope of the project soon expanded to include both the production and DR envi-
ronment, proving to be more cost effective to virtualize both environments at the same time, as well
as easier to replicate between systems for DR purposes. The IT department also selected Vizioncore’s
vRanger Pro to provide backup and restore management capabilities for the virtual machines (VMs).
Although Generali had been utilizing a general disk-to-disk backup solution for over five years to pro-
tect up to a year’s worth of data, the demands on its storage resources increased considerably once
the virtualized server environment had been implemented. The team could no longer protect even
three months of backups on its existing disk backup system forcing them to reallocate a large portion
of its primary storage – a costly solution for extended retention of backup data.
To continue using the primary system would require increasing the storage capacity at both the
production and DR sites, an approach the Generali team knew was cost-prohibitive and inefficient.
Further, trying to replicate the backups of its VMs using non-optimized replication overwhelmed the
100 MB link that connects the Guernsey-based primary data center and DR site, further limiting the
organization’s data protection capabilities.
EMC Backup and Recovery Solutions
• EMC Data Domain DD500 Series deduplication
storage systems
• EMC Data Domain Replicator software
• VMware ESX server virtualization solution
• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
In order to realize the full benefits of its virtualization strategy, Generali needed to find an alternative
backup solution that would minimize storage consumption and require less bandwidth to replicate.
In search of a more efficient, scalable and manageable solution, the IT organization began research-
ing different approaches to reduce its backup sets via deduplication.
EMC Data Domain Solution
Iain Davidson, Operations Manager, Information Systems at Generali led the research effort, con-
sidering a number of different deduplication solutions available. He noted, “Having spent a couple
weeks looking closely at solutions, it became very apparent that EMC’s approach to deduplication
with Data Domain kept coming up. There’s nothing else out there that has the kudos and reputation
that the EMC Data Domain portfolio has. We try to go best-of-breed whenever we can and when we
looked at what we wanted to achieve, it was clear that Data Domain was the right solution for us.”

The team moved ahead quickly, first setting up a multi-system trial to test the performance and
reliability of the Data Domain platform’s deduplication and replication capabilities, and then quickly
moved the systems into production. “It took less than a day to configure the systems. The sales
engineer conducted a backup, set policies, checked the replication, and completed a full restore
before leaving the site and it has worked like a dream since. We’ve rarely had to touch the systems,”
continued Mr. Davidson.

“I have so much more confidence in our ability to recover data

quickly now. I recently conducted a full virtual server rebuild
from the Data Domain system, and the server was back up
and in the infrastructure within 45 minutes — a process that
may have taken a day or more in our prevous physical
server environment.”
Iain Davidson, Operations Manager, Information Systems

The two Data Domain DD600 Series systems that Generali purchased along with Data Domain
Replicator software are now an essential part of Generali’s data protection infrastructure. Generali
backs up all business critical data through vRanger Pro to Data Domain, replicating an exact copy to
the DR site using just a fraction of the bandwidth and time previously required and achieving fast
time-to-DR synch.

One area that has particularly impressed Mr. Davidson is the support Generali has received for its
EMC Data Domain systems. “From the sales engineer who installed the systems, to the support staff
on the other end of the phone, nothing is too much trouble. Any company that notifies its customer
that there is a potential issue before it happens is a first rate company with which to do business.”

Business Benefits
Since implementing EMC Data Domain, Generali has been able to reduce the storage capacity
required to backup and protect its virtualized server infrastructure by as much as 70:1, with an
average ratio of 38:1 compression across all data sets. This has enabled the organization to achieve
considerable cost, administration and management savings as it now takes just 2.5 TB of disk space
to store 92 TB of backup data. “To get the same amount of storage on my SAN would have been
extremely expensive, plus I would need the same resource utilization at my DR site too. EMC Data
Domain is proving to be a real cost-saver for Generali,” said Davidson.

Network-efficient replication has enabled the Generali team to ensure that its enterprise-wide
production data is quickly and automatically secure at its DR site for business continuity and
compliance-related activities. “Our CEO is very technology aware, and business continuity planning
is a high priority,” explained Mr. Davidson. “I have so much more confidence in our ability to recover
data quickly now. I recently conducted a full virtual server rebuild from the Data Domain system, and
the server was back up and in the infrastructure within 45 minutes – a process that may have taken
a day or more in our previous physical server environment.”

By deploying VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, Generali has further simplified recovery testing
and improved overall DR management. Every month Davidson and his team conduct a failover test,
selecting a non-critical server to go down and be recovered. This has further added to the organiza-
tion’s confidence in its ability to recover data quickly and reliably should the need arise.

From an administrative perspective Davidson estimates that the team now spends 50% less time
managing its virtual infrastructure. Instead of having to verify data protection processes server by
server, the team now receives one daily update email confirming that all systems are up and running
correctly, and that backup and replication processes have been completed successfully. In addition,
backups via Data Domain are now also a lot faster, significantly reducing the backup window.

Future plans include expanding the use of Data Domain across the organization. In the meantime
Davidson has implemented a tiered storage approach, requiring the business to decide on the
criticality of each data set, and if necessary provide the budget needed to extend its tier 1 storage
retention based on accessibility requirements.

Davidson concludes, “Virtualization is definitely the way ahead, but it’s also just one building block.
You can make it a lot more efficient and cost effective by adding the right systems and applications.
EMC Data Domain is now a central part of our infrastructure. As we continue to expand our use of
Data Domain within the organization, any other solutions we implement will have to work with
Data Domain. I am not prepared to forego the functionality and the benefits that Data Domain
gives me.”
cu stom e r p r of i le

Hard Rock Hotel & Casino

Faster, more manageable data backup operations

help maintain high-end guest services during
major property expansion
Business overview
The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is a premier destination entertainment resort located on 16.7 acres in
Las Vegas, Nevada. The property offers an energetic entertaining and gaming experience with the services
and amenities associated with a boutique luxury resort hotel. Built in 1995 and expanded in 2007,
the property features an 11-story Hard Rock Hotel Tower, more than 1,600 guest rooms, and one of
the “Top 10 Pools” in the world, according to the Travel Channel.

Challenges
Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is in the midst of a major expansion, with construction underway
to increase its number of guest rooms from 650 to nearly 1,600. At the same time, the resort’s critical
systems, front-line computers, and the property’s 140 plus point-of-sale terminals used to make
reservations for spa treatments and process payments for food, drinks and merchandise, still need to
be up and running.

“Doing a major property expansion while we’re open is kind like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube,”
explained Rob Kosier, director of information technology at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. “We still
need to maintain top-flight guest services even as we periodically shut down certain operations
because of construction. Our old tape backup system made this even more challenging due to
lengthy backup jobs that frequently exceeded the available backup window, which negatively
impacted our production applications.”

Although Hard Rock rotated scheduled backups for multiple systems on alternate days to alleviate
the impact on production systems, growing volumes of data were causing some backups to extend
into the following day, reducing productivity. In addition, Hard Rock’s tape backup systems were
unreliable, requiring manual intervention from the IT teams. And, tape costs were consistently
increasing every month.

As Hard Rock continued to expand, there were many occasions when senior management required
access to Microsoft® Exchange e-mails that often were only stored on tape. To restore them, the IT
department needed to search for the correct tape and initiate a time-consuming restore process.
Because of the many different versions of Exchange in use, the IT Department would occasionally
have to rebuild an out-of-date system. This process could take several weeks depending on current
projects and construction.
 EMC solution
After a successful proof of concept, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino replaced its Symantec NetBackup and
tape-based systems with EMC® Avamar® disk-based backup, recovery, and deduplication solution.

Hard Rock now uses Avamar to efficiently back up its critical revenue-generating POS system, spa
management files, Microsoft Exchange e-mails, Microsoft SQL Server® database, and other applications.
Avamar protects approximately 60 physical servers and VMware® virtual machines via fast, daily full
backups to a centralized Avamar storage grid. By deploying VMware, Hard Rock consolidated several of
its physical servers into virtual machines running on ESX® servers, which utilize EMC CLARiiON® CX3-40
networked storage.

In addition, Hard Rock uses EMC SourceOne™ Email Management to archive e-mails older than nine
months from its EMC CLARiiON CX3 production system to EMC Centera® for long-term, cost-effective
storage and e-mail legal discovery.

“Basically we’ve gone from a complex system where we would

do full backups one day and incrementals the next to an
extremely efficient and simple Avamar solution that provides
daily full backups within available backup windows and speedy
one-step recovery when needed.”
Rob Kosier, Director of Information Technology, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino

Backup and recovery systems

Avamar has enabled Hard Rock Hotel & Casino’s IT department to efficiently protect critical data via
fast, daily full backups using existing physical and virtual infrastructure. And Avamar integrated
global, source data deduplication technology has reduced required backup disk storage, while fast
single-step recovery reduces the burden on the IT staff.

For example, Avamar integrated deduplication reduced file server backup data by more than 80 percent.
By only sending new, unique sub-file data segments during Avamar daily full backups, Hard Rock’s backup
times have been dramatically reduced from 18-36 hours to just 4-6 hours. Additionally, Microsoft
Exchange backups have been reduced from 12 hours to less than 30 minutes. As a result, backup jobs are
now easily completed within available backup windows without impacting product system performance or
end-user productivity. In addition, data is deduplicated so less storage is required, enabling Avamar’s
daily full backups to be retained for extended periods of time for fast, single-step recovery from disk.

Kosier said, “Basically we’ve gone from a complex system where we would do full backups one day
and incrementals the next to an extremely efficient and simple Avamar solution that provides daily
full backups within available backup windows and speedy one-step recovery when needed.”

Data recovery timeframes have also been dramatically reduced from 3-7 days to just a few minutes.

Summary
Archiving older e-mails to Centera with EMC SourceOne Email Management has helped especially with
the increased number of requests for restored e-mails from Hard Rock’s senior management.

“We’ve saved a ton of time over the last year,” said Kosier. “I do e-mail investigations for senior
management in about five minutes weekly because it’s so much easier to retrieve e-mails on Centera
than on tape.”
VMware and EMC have enabled Hard Rock to keep pace with high data growth rates and facility expansion
without significantly increasing its hardware footprint or adding IT personnel.

“In Las Vegas, everything moves quickly,” commented Kosier. “A 3-year construction project anywhere
else takes half the time here. With EMC, we can be more flexible and responsive to timelines like
these. We were able to get everything moved over to Avamar and our people trained in a week. And it
only takes a few minutes to add a new client—virtual or physical—to Avamar.”

Kosier continued, “Because of this flexibility, our ROI with EMC has been a lot faster than we forecasted.
As we nearly triple the number of rooms on our property, we know our critical data will be available and
protected during this complex transition period and later across a much larger enterprise.”

About EMC
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world’s leading developer and provider of information infrastructure
technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete
and create value from their information. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found
at www.EMC.com.
EMC Corporation
Hopkinton Take the next step
Massachusetts To learn more about EMC Backup and Recovery Solutions, contact your local EMC sales
01748-9103
1-508-435-1000
representative or authorized value added reseller, call us at 1-866-WE-DDUPE or
In North America 1-866-464-7381 visit www.EMC.com.
www.EMC.com

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