Dedupe Plus Tape Cuts Backup In Half, Admin Time By 75%

The Burden of Slow Backup

TreeHouse Interactive is a well-established, growing provider of cutting-edge partner relationship management (PRM) and marketing automation platform (MAP) solutions. The company’s applications are delivered through a Software-as-a-Service model (SaaS), meaning that IT reliability and data protection are paramount. So slow backups quickly became a significant problem.

“Our backup times were incredibly slow,” says Kory Willis, IT Support Manager at TreeHouse Interactive. “We didn’t have enough time in a day to run a full backup, and even when we’d stagger backups it would degrade overall performance.” Willis found himself spending upwards of 40 percent of his time every week managing backups and tweaking the system in search of more speed. At one point, the company repurposed an old Quantum SuperLoader® to help and was pleased to discover that, although it was over ten years old, it was totally reliable and 3-4 times faster than the disk array they’d been using. That got the TreeHouse IT team thinking.

Rock-Solid Reliability, Year After Year

TreeHouse was already familiar with Quantum’s leadership position in data storage, and as the team did more research, it quickly became apparent that a Quantum tiered storage solution might be the answer. “Our decision to use Quantum turned out to be an easy one because the old SuperLoader worked so well,” says Willis. The team settled on an 8TB Quantum DXi6700 deduplication appliance for its production data center in Salt Lake City and two Scalar® i40 tape libraries, one in the data center and a second unit in the company’s Las Vegas development center. Installation and set-up went smoothly.

“Quantum technicians got on the line with us as part of the deployment,” recalls Willis. “It made the whole process straightforward and easy.”

Backup Times Cut in Half—Admin Time Reduced 75%

“We couldn’t be more pleased,” Willis reports. “The DXi® appliance is insanely fast, and the Scalar i40s just scream. And an added selling point has been the scalability...the Quantum solution can just grow with us...It's given the system even more capacity and I’m looking forward to how much bandwidth it will save when we eventually deploy a second appliance for replication.”

With the DXi, backup times have been cut in half. TreeHouse is now able to easily complete incremental backups each day, as well as full backups every weekend. Fulls are transferred to tape on the Scalar i40s for long-term storage and disaster protection.

Quantum solutions lived up to expectations in terms of reliability, and perhaps most importantly, the tiered solution has given back a precious commodity to the team: time. Backup administration time has been reduced more than 75%.

“From an ROI standpoint, the Quantum solution really paid for itself,” says Willis. “Now...I just come in every morning...make sure my Symantec Backup Exec dashboard is showing nice green checkmarks...I never have to do anything with the Quantum systems.

“I’ve been really impressed with the Quantum organization and products. The whole experience has been so stellar I just can’t recommend the company highly enough.”